Is having duplicate content on the same site OK? Is it detrimental to search engine ranking? Will one of those "omitted results" be one of my pages? I know it sounds kind of stupid, but I just wanted to make sure. Meh, I'm stupid. Be nice. Grand.
Duplicate content could be detrimental for your site. You should try to remove those duplicated pages from the robot's way. For instance, you could put them in a directory protected by .htaccess.
Thanks for the idea, I don't really know much about .htaccess but I can look that up. By the way, these aren't duplicate pages, just one page has a paragraph of text from many other pages. On one page there is a bunch of descriptions and and if you go to one of those pages it will also have the description for the selected thing. I hope that makes sense.
I don't think it will hurt much. Because in forums we have all the welcome stuff same on 10,000 pages. "Hello", "Welcome to DP" etc. etc.
Assuming that we are not talking full page duplication I can't see any problem with this. Repeating a paragraph of text is quite a natural thing to do on wbsites when describing services for example. Let's say you sell something online and you have a paragraph or two of text on a separate page briefly describing one of your products with a link to the actual page where it is sold. It would be perfectly natural to repeat that text on the selling page.
Single paragraphs being duplicated won't be a problem, to be on the safe side it would probably be better to have a link by that paragraph pointing to the original content. It is a problem when there are multiple paragraphs or entire pages being copied. If there is content you want to block, you can use robots.txt to block spiders from crawling those sites. Google robots.txt for more information.
add <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> tags to the pages that look too similar, e.g. if you have a blog - your monthly archives or category pages duplicate your posts, and it is wise to prevent them from being indexed.
Yes duplication is a problem but not to that extent When a spider indexes a site it first checks for duplicate only So we should not duplicate the content Also There is another question? If a site which has duplicated content from other site if indexedfirst by Google than the original site then which site will be penalized for duplicate content,? The duplicate site which was first indexed or Original site which was indexed by google later
According to this article Google ranks results with no regard to the origin of content, actually the origin can be moved to the supplementary results: h__p://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Duplicate-Content-Penalties-Problems-with-Googles-Filter/
By the way, I've recently written an article on duplicate content, may be it will help you: h__p://www.seoresearcher.com/duplicate-content-what-everybody-ought-to-know-about.htm