Duplicate Content

The question of whether duplicate content can get you penalized in the search engines -- and how to avoid that if it can -- is a topic of hot debate these days.
Many webmasters live in fear, agonizing over questions like:
- What is duplicate content?
- Why do search engines care about duplicate content?
- Should they worry about duplicate content?
- What can they do to avoid a duplicate content penalty if there is one?
First, understand that there is no clear definition of duplicate content and it is not absolutely clear that there is any such thing as a duplicate content penalty. In general, however, the belief is that repetition of large blocks of the same content (such as an article or syndicated blog post) within either the same domain or across many different domains could trigger a penalty in search engines such as Google.
So why would search engines care about duplicate content?
If you think about how search engines work and how they make their