When developing in CMS its sometimes hard to track duplicate content and control. I was after some advise on the following please: Using CMS i have developed a website that has a sidebar on most pages which contains a search feature / Latest News Excerpts / Latest Testimonial Excerpt. These small excerpts are clippings from the main article and have a link directing to each individual news item or testimonial. Because this sidebar appears on more than one page, meaning the excerpts do as well, will this be classed as duplicate content in the eyes of SE's? if so how can i remedy this without removing the sidebar?
I have the same problem with my site - the sidebar uses the same images and descriptions on each page. I am currently 90% of the way through rewriting the site and am hoping this will lead to serps improvements on some of the back pages. Will let you know.
I have a similar issue of main page outranking the article. But if an excerpt invalidated an entire article then pages like Digg wouldn't get indexed, since it uses the same concept. I truly doubt this is the issue.
If the sidebar is useful for your visitors search engines should like it. They need to show useful sites in the top of SERPs -- that is their business.