So following things... In general each page is independant of other pages. If you have two pages on your site with the same content, one of them will be penalized. Which means it won't show up in Serps etc. Is there ANY penalty impact on the page that actually wins the determination between the two pages? In other words, Page A1 and A2 have the same content. The search engine decides that A1 is the real page, and penalizes A2 so it does not rank or whatever it does to penalize duplciate pages. Will there be any impact on page A1 at all?
That is a very good question. Unfortunately, I think Google is probably the only one that really knows for sure.
There's no penalty. Google simply shows the most reputable page. If there was a penalty all you need to do is copy someones page to get it penalized.
That is what I thought, just wanted to be sure because when dealing with internal pages, it may be possible to have duplicate content, and I just wanted to decide how important it was to eliminate it. If there is no penalty for the more reputable page than there are cases where I would just let it be.
I thought it would be the first site that Google indexed that will get the nod? (this doesn't go against the reputable sites theory since Google will index the new pages from the reputable sites before any other site) After that all pages with same content will be simply ignored?
Not sure that always holds true.. I have been reading a bit on various incidents of page hijacking where people did it with redirects and such. Google ended up dropping the original pages from the index in favor of the hijacker links. Not sure that is entirely applicable as other factors were involved.