In my website I got some pages which have less content and more common elements such as header, footer and left side menus/links. Most of the common elements take up about 60-70% of the content. Would this cause a duplicate content issue? I see no other way to improve it apart from adding more content into the pages which is not the nature of the website. Any suggestions?
As long as the total supporting text is more than the content's text I don't think there will be a problem. There are other ways to raise the uniqueness of each page like images with alt attribute.
I don't think that would be a duplicate issue. SE generally have technology sophisticated enough to detect the navigation.
No, it wouldn't be duplicate content. As for suggestions, write more unique page content. It's that simple. [Edit: I am not referring to title tags or META data here.]
Title tags and description meta tags are also included in determining duplicate pages. So make sure that you make these attributes "unique" for each page
I also have this problem too, so I will go back and modify my title, description, image names include the alt. Thank pokerguru that asked this issue.
Thanks all for the info it seems I can get away with DC issue after taking all aspect into account. I'll try to add more unique content but by nature of this website I've limitations.