Originally Posted by PornMD

Simply put, his post is bullshit. Google omits "similar" results and he himself indicated it's a factor even if it's a small one. Citing monstrous authority news sites like CNN to say dupe content contains no penalty was just silly. So you mean Google doesn't penalize some of the oldest most respected news orgs in the world for duplicate content? No shit? That's called COMMON SENSE. People expect to see those sites in the results - if they didn't, they would use a different search engine. Google's algorithm being complex is for the sole reason to put sites like those up high in results and fly-by-night sites not so high (for instance, sites that ONLY copy from others and have nothing else to offer, hence...*drumroll* dupe content penalties). Sometimes they fail, but for the most part they don't.

SEO is 99% common sense. What would your objective for search results in your search engine be if you were Google? Give people the results they're trying to find, right? What tactics would you use to fulfill that objective? Answer that and you're more of an SEO expert than most people claim to be.

I thought I'd forego all that with "" but apparently the OP was butthurt with the irony I pointed out.