What is "Common Content" ?

I think you are referring to “duplicate content” or I guess “common content” could be used, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate. You do not want to copy content from another site and use it on your site because the search engines will view this as “duplicate content” and you will be penalized.

Some webmasters used to (some still do) copy word for word a very reputable gambling sites’ content and use it on their site. This is frowned upon from the search engines now and is not recommended.

I don’t believe the same navigation throughout can hurt your site, unless I’m missing something?

Mark
http://www.focalclick.com

Common content is different from duplicate content. It means content that remains the same from page to page on your site.

For example, I used to use a ‘lowerpage.html’ file which had all of my feeds / blogs on it. Since it made up about 75% of the content on the page… AND it was used for every page on my site, I got the boot from Yahoo. Once I removed this ‘common content’, Yahoo re-indexed my site and I am doing well with them.

There are duplicate content checkers out there on the web. My suggestion woud be to use that and keep your duplication as low as possible. This helped me.

Thank You,