This is a direct quote from the Official Google Webmaster Blog:
| Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” |
Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty”
They also state:
| However, some webmasters attempt to improve their page’s ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don’t add any value to users. |
Source: Little or no original content – Webmaster Tools Help
According to Google they do have a duplicate content filter, which is not the same as a penalty. However, if your duplicate content crosses certain lines you could have your website de-indexed:
| Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. |
