[PagePeelMarketing.com]

There's a great deal of confusion as to what is considered "duplicate content" and what will be penalized. The most common arguments are ones such as this; "How do news sites get away with posting the same news across several sites? Isn't that considered duplicate content?" Or, "What about all the article directories and people posting articles to 30 or 40 of them, isn't that considered duplicate content?"

The answer is, no, it is not considered duplicate content because the enforcement of that rule would be too ambiguous and difficult. What Google and other search engines penalize as duplicate content is for those webmasters who own and run several, or many, websites (typically designed for Adsense revenues) on the same server, thereby essentially having the same IP address. If Google determines that a single IP address is hosting very similar or the same content across more than one domain, then it would be considered "duplicate content" and all sites containing that content would be penalized.