Penalty on Duplicate Content
One of the most painful tasks for webmasters is to generate good quality, unique content. I am sure webmasters would agree with me. It is even tougher if you are not the expert in your industry. Generating unique content that is useful for online readers is almost not possible.
Search engines like Google has taken extra steps to clamp down on web sites with duplicate content. In fact, Yahoo! has done something similar. I know about this because one of my sites has a lot of duplicate content. Google index all my pages still, but those pages cannot be found in top 1000 of the search result. Yahoo! simply ignore those duplicate content pages that I have on the site. The site has about 150 pages of content. But yahoo only index 15 pages which are more unique.
Of course, it was not my intention to have those duplicate content in the 1st place. It so happen that there is a bigger, authority site providing so much good quality content that I have nothing much to write for the site.
If 2 pages contain duplicate content, Google will give high ranking to the pages which belong to a reputable/authority site: (Example Ministry of Education Singapore). It will consider the other site a duplicate, and pages belonging to that site will not receive decent ranking.
Search enignes have their reasons for doing so. They do not want internet users to search for results of the same thing. this is not useful.
Now, I can only do a total revamp of my site. Removing almost all the duplicate content. As a webmaster and SEO specialist, I believe that it is no use writing if search engines dun find my pages attractive.
If you are responsible for generating content for your company’s site, you may want to avoid having duplicate pages. There is a site which can check for duplicate content online: http://www.copyscape.com.