Duplicate Content - Site Wide or Internet Wide?

[Prime85]

Hello...

I am creating a new website and i was wondering how you guys would define duplicate content?

If my new site had the same page titles and descriptions as my existing site, would that be duplicate content?  Or does duplicate content mean same titles and descriptions in the same site?

I'm wondering if i can upload the same database (with page titles and descriptions and alt tags) to my new site or if that would be looked at as duplicate...

Thanks

[Prime85]

Thanks for clearing that up!

[KaneJamison]

Duplicate content would a piece of content (as small as a sentence or paragraph or as long as a full article) that is found on 2 different URLs without any canonical tag to indicate which version takes precedent.

For example, let's say you have a paragraph of text in your sidebar that is repeated on every page of the site. That paragraph is duplicate content. That doesn't mean it's an issue with such a small piece of content - it's OK to have small pieces of content like that showing up throughout the site - but you want to avoid creating pages where most of the content is duplicate.

Page title and page description definitely need to be unique, preferably on each page of your website.

Anything involving "uploading the same database of content" to your site will most definitely not be unique. In a pre-Panda world you might have gotten away with adding some templates around that database content and calling it unique, but that doesn't cut it anymore.

In terms of building a new site:

If you're building it on a new domain, then you need to (A) make the content different or (B) delete the old site and hopefully 301 redirect the old domain's backlinks to your new domain.

If you're building it on the existing domain, you should be deleting the old pages and if the URLs are changing, then you should be 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL for related pages.