Is duplicate content really that bad?

[artcoder]

I know WordPress sites have lot of different URLs that goes to same content. And there are lots of techniques on the web about how to alter WordPress to prevent this "duplicate content".

But is duplicated content really that bad that people have to go through all the trouble of customizing the wordpress just to avoid duplicate content?

I'm thinking that it is not worth the trouble. Have anybody notice any dramatic difference when they eliminated dup content from WordPress?

[Chris]

It isn't much trouble, Ib elieve installing 1 plugin in 5 minutes takes care of most of it.

And it isn't wholly necessary. OScommerce is worse than wordpress with this, each category a product is listed in results in a new URL, and yet I still have great SEO success in spite of using OSC.

Still, every bit helps, and if there is an easy way to tackle the issue, you should tackle it (modding OSC = not easy).

[allout]

Duplicate content is really more myth than reality. During the boom of the MFA sites, Google starting to penalize sites that were made up of copied articles just to earn Adsense. These sites were sold by the thousands and they were deindexed from Google.

This caused the big panic that duplicate content of any kind will get you deindexed. Of course that has been proved wrong because several sites use some duplicate content at least once.

I use the All-In One SEO plug-in just to make my site neater for the search engines. It is no problem to install and as Chris said, the whole process takes about 5 minutes.

[cooluks]

It is always send to supplemental index by Google... But you always rephrase it making it unique...

[allout]

It is always send to supplemental index by Google... But you always rephrase it making it unique...

Not true, you can find thousands of sites with duplicate content in the main index. Supplemental is used for sites that are not quite up to snuff to be considered in the main index, it has nothing to do with duplicate content.