Many people have for a long time been told a story - a myth, actually about Google's policies. This myth would lead you to believe that Google will penalize websites for having duplicate content. In other words, if the website has two or more pages that have same content, Google automatically lowers their rankings. It's a pure fantasy in the overall sense, but there are some parts of the reality that could lead one to believe that the whole thing's true.
As an illustration, let's say that you have two pages that have the same content as each other on your website. However, one of these pages is more search engine optimized than the other. Now, let's say that Google sees the not so optimized page first. It will use that one on the search engine results page and disregard the other as being just a junk page. It's not really a penalty against the website, as much as it only saw the lesser page, and didn't even look at the better one. No harm, no foul in their book. Of course, this would be a problem for you, because your ranking suffered for it. It's easy enough to fix. Just go to the XML site map and enter the page you want to be listed, and leave the other one out of it.
It has also been theorized in the duplicate content penalty myth that if you have a site that took content from another, older site, you get docked for it. This seems to be a more or less reasonable argument, but apparently Google wasn't designed to rank on this basis. You will probably still rank below the other site, but you won't be penalized for it. Of course, if the original site is so terribly arranged that your own arrangement is significantly better than theirs, you might just outrank them.
Another speculation about this legend is that if you use reprinted articles from article directories such as Ezine as your Web content, you may get flagged for having duplicate content. Again, it's not true. Much like as in the previous theory, the link weight is the big determining factor. In this particular case, the preexistence of the article has no part in who gets listed higher. It's all about which site has the better search engine optimization.
One bit of reality can create some confusion this way. When using Google AdSense and (maybe) Google AdWords, a website can very well get a duplicate content penalty. Some websites can fly under the radar with Google AdSense, while others occasionally get snagged. In all likelihood, it depends on just how highly ranked, or "visible" the site is. Google AdWords is a different matter altogether. There is a great level of inconsistency between their policies and their rules, so no one is entirely sure just what is going on there.
At any rate, if you're not using Google AdSense or AdWords, you have nothing to fear. AdSense and AdWords apparently have a duplicate content penalty, but they're isolated parts of Google. Outside of them, it doesn't exist.
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