There seems to be a lot of people disagreeing on rather there is or is not a duplicate content penalty and I’d like to take a moment and explain why there is not. I’ll back up everything I’m about to post with a little proof.
First there is not a penalty but there is a filter however, there seems to be some misunderstanding on how the filter works. I made a post here today about lawnmowers to prove my point
Lawn Mowers - Keep The Beauty Of Your Lawn Maintained please ignore the ugly design and messed up text header. I’ll try and fix that as soon as I finish writing this.
If we check Google
Lawn Mowers - Keep The Beauty Of Your Lawn Maintained - Google Search we will notice that I rank # 3 and the original article ranks #1&2.
It’s an exact copy and my site was not penalized banned or anything else. However I wanted to test something else so I took another blog and made another post. This time about silicone wristbands
WHAT ARE THE RUBBER SILICONE BRACELETS MADE OUT OF? | Silicone Wristbands and it’s an exact copy of another article that’s on another one of my sites.
This time the site does not rank at all for the key phrase. The second is a stronger site and should have ranked but it doesn’t. The reason is that the second site is an exact copy of the site that the original article is on.
This means that copying a quote, sentence, statement, phrase or the whole darn article want get your site banned, penalized or anything else. It also means that if you duplicate your site and have different text on every page then you’re fine. But if you duplicate your site and have the exact same content on the site then Google will pick one and drop the other.
Unless someone has copied your site and the text on your site they can’t affect your ranking.