What is the general consensus on duplicate content? need to settle a difference in opinion

Hi,

Me and my Dad have just had a debate on duplicate content.

He seems to think that programs like forumposter are pointlesss as it posts the same post to each board. he thinks that the links wont be counted or you will even be penalised for having the same message on different boards.

i believe that spider's algorithms are far more complicated than this and they make decisions on a set of conditions and factors i.e. if there are more than 20 words identical in succession then it's duplicate content. single or double sentenced posts probably wont fall under this.

forum poster doesn't (or makes it very hard to) post unique content to different boards. there are other programs that can spin the content using synonyms but using forumposter for small posts wont be picked up by google.

i believe you will be penalised for blatant duplicate content but there is loads of unintentional duplicating on the web. i.e. quoting official documentation etc.

so what do you guys think? am i right?
thanks

avoid 100% dupe content at all cost. 1-3 lines is fine but you want your content at least 30% unique.

had a site with over 10k pages have all the pages remove from google due to being dupe. all the unique content is still there and home page is fine.

Avoid 100% dupe content. Just do the work and get unique content if you want long term results.

so lets say i put "example text one, link one. more example text" into forumposter and posted it to 100 different forums. that would be marked as duplicate content?

If you are talking forum posts, then there is a lot of other accompanying text on the page as well as other posts. They will have different page titles, meta's and chances are the boards in different niche's.

Duplicate content isn't much of a concern here, but having identical anchor text in all your backlinks "may" be seen as over optimization and result in some negatives.

But this is easily overcome, just pick several different anchors to use and rotate them in batches of forum posts.

I have site made of completely duplicate content. I just get post free articles from different article sites. My site places pretty good in the searches. So I'm not so sure how much I believe in the duplicate content theory. Or the duplicate anchor tags as a lot of my niche directories either use my name or just "vist website" and google seems to love those.

But if posting to a forum you should be alright as mentioned above. There should be unique content above and below your posting.

thanks for the great replies! i agree with sweetfunny and rooro.

rooro- so do you think duplicate content is fine as long as there is no connection between the original and copied content?

thanks

My guess (and we are all guessing) is most search engines will recoginse the main stream forums and process them accordingly. Thus flagging duplicate content.