Will google penalize me for posting the same content twice?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Travis Bailey: It`s probably not going to help matters, but likely won`t result in a really super duper serious penalty situation. So you have a bookshelf. You only have so much space, and you have a lot of books. Are you going to shelve two copies of the same book? Probably not, but you`ll definitely shelve one of them for various reasons.If we look at things on the page level, it doesn`t make sense to rank two identical pages on the same topic. The algorithm will, generally, pick one or the other for any given query. This doesn`t happen 100% of the time, though. There are many cases where things didn`t go as Google intended. If by `description`, you mean `content` of the page - it likely wouldn`t be a deadly mistake if the content is original enough. But if you just copied and pasted some manufacturer/vendor content, word for word, you`ll eventually end up getting caught in `thin affiliate` territory. And that is most definitely a penalty waiting to happen. So you could definitely massage the existing content into something unique enough. There are only so many ways to say something about any given topic. The important part is the value added by any given page. Besides, Google will probably just rank the Amazon listing if you straight copy pasta`d. Because Amazon. :)
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  Abhigyan Srivastava: No. Google wont penalize you for that. Most products on Amazon have the same description across various e-commerce sites.
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  Walter Mrowczynski III: Yes, Google WILL penalize you for having the same descriptions as Amazon. That`s why Amazon Affiliate plugins that allow you to import products from Amazon to WooCommerce such as Prosociate have text spinning to rewrite the content. Anybody saying No clearly does not have their own Amazon store set up.
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  Muhammad Ali Khan: Thanks for the tip but the problem is I already have have the website and I think I have the woocommerce setup on it so how should I overcome this problem you know if I import product description from Amazon in to into the woocommerce store is there a way to overcome this problem
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  Walter Mrowczynski III: Yes, rewrite the descriptions.