Often I read about the evils of duplicate content in a site, and the wrath Google will supposedly bring on your site if you don’t go to great lengths to prevent it. So it was interesting to read a post by Vanessa Fox on the subject at the Google WebMaster Central blog.
To summarise the 3 main points:
- Google will work out unique content on a site
- having duplicate content on a site does not incur a penalty, but 1 version will be considered primary
- You will not automatically be banished to supplemental hell
Duplicate content is a natural occurrence with blog systems such as WordPress, and I think Google is smart enough to understand this.
Now if you steal all your content from other sites you will be in trouble.