When your website or blog is found out to have an almost similar, if not exactly similar, content as with any other website, this is considered to be duplicate content, which is one of the reasons why Google puts down the rank of certain websites in search engine results or omit the page altogether.
In this world when sharing and distributing articles has already become popular, it is easy to wonder how the websites will deal with it if their content gets copied somewhere else, albeit with proper credit. It seems that Google itself is not that intelligent enough to detect whether something is maliciously copied or not. Duplicate content in itself is not bad, because it really happens, albeit something accidentally. What's probably worse is that Goolge appears to have no idea which of two similar pages is the duplicate, which may lead to the original one getting penalized.
I'm not sure if it's already bordering on too much, but your website may be in danger if the articles in your home page are exactly the same as in the permalinks. This is pretty common even among ordinary blogs, which do not really use plugins that allow you to cut certain paragraphs. Indeed, one can. Use the break page or more option in your Wordpress editor.
As for other duplicate content outside your control, your best option for now is to use software that allow you to see the duplicates. One website that I can think of is Copyscape. The website is free to use for everyone, although premium services (such as updates on perceived duplicate content in the future) already come with higher prices. It protects the integrity of our respective
To help us even understand more how duplicate content works, here's a video from SEOMOZ.com. There you will learn how Google penalizes such content and how you will be able to deal with this kind of web issue. It's a bit lengthy but very useful for your web business.
