How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from New York. Jason asks, how does duplicate content that’s legally required– for example, terms and conditions across multiple offers– affect performance in search? And there was a follow up comment to that, where someone said, particularly for people in the financial services industry or pharma, we want to know the answer to this. The answer is I wouldn’t stress about this. Unless the content that you have that’s duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing or something like that– then an algorithm or a person might take action on it. But if it’s legal boilerplate that is sort of required to be there, we might at most not want to count that. But it’s probably not going to cause you a big issue. We do understand that lots of different places across the web do need to have various disclaimers, legal information, terms and conditions, that sort of stuff. And so it’s the sort of thing where if we were to not rank that stuff well, then that would probably hurt our overall search quality. So I wouldn’t stress out about that.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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