Engineer Greg Grothaus discusses the myths surrounding duplicate content and suggests ways for webmasters to avoid common problems. He also talks about the creation of multiple sites around the same topic and its implications. Greg originally gave this presentation at SES San Jose and has chosen to record this video to reach a broader audience.

Duplicate Content
Google recognizes that most duplicates are not malicious in nature so there is no point in penalizing them. However, the company is driven to produce quality results with distinctive information, and this is the primary reason why similar pages are omitted. Greg goes into detail about using 301 redirects and canonical tags to resolve familiar issues.

Multiple Sites
Large organizations and multinational companies may use multiple sites to localize their content for each country. This is fine as far as Google is concerned. There are no penalties for such a strategy but note that this may create a few undesirable consequences. First, the site’s reputation will be distributed across the domains leading to a lower ranking for each. Second, only the best page will come out in the results so not all sites may get attention. Lastly, this strategy loses the benefits of the tabbed UI, especially the potential to have more subpages noticed.

Video Link:
Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues –