But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren't talking about scraping or domain farms; they're talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like
http://www.example.com/skates.asp?co...&brand=riedell and
http://www.example.com/skates.asp?br...ll&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance, but it doesn't cause penalties.
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This type of non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many CMSs don't handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it's not because you're likely to be penalized; it's simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work.