Hi. I am making a site which is user focused. One of the things im thinking of offering is ready made templates. I would like to know whether my main site would be penalized by search engines for all the duplicate content on mysite.com/templateid# also to what extent the template pages would be penalized for 1000pages saying the same thing. Thankyou
no it will not. main site will most likely have a thumb or image preview where the inner page will have the actual template with all the details and download option. think of a blog where main site has the recent post excerpts and inner pages have the actual post. same concept
Be sure to include some synopsis or description for the template and each of your page will be different.
There would be no Duplicate content penalty on what you are saying, You just need to give different description on each Categories of the layout.