There were some excellent potential solutions to duplicate content discussed at the Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced. I also learned a couple important points:
- Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
- Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.
So to differentiate your original content from syndication, scraper sites, or internal duplication, it’s important to have the most links pointing to that original content.
For even more information about duplicate content, you might be interested in this post, Deftly dealing with duplicate content.