Finger - 6:10 pm on Sep 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I'm pretty new to the SEO game and I have some questions I've been having some trouble finding the answers to.

1) If you have two completely different domains with identical index.html's that do not link to each other, and googlebot finds both of them through links from other domains, does Google have some way of detecting identical pages like this?

2) Does the .php extention give any penalty? I've heard it doesn't, but I changed my www.domain/index.html to index.php after it was already indexed and now my page seems to have vanished from Google (by vanished I mean that I cant find my site even when I search for a string unique to my site). However, besides changing the extention (and adding a simple counter and tracking system) I did change the site quite a bit - could this have caused that change in my Google listing (perhaps by being considered a dynamic web page)?

3) How different does a site have to be so that its not considered duplicate? For example, if another common name for widgets is thingamajigs, and you have one page optimized for "widgets" keywords, and then you create another page optimized for "thingamajigs" keywords by simply replacing "widgets" with "thingamajigs", will Google determine they are duplicate pages? If so, would changing the format of the pages counteract this, or does Google rely mainly on content text in dermining this?

4) Do sites get de-listed from Google often? If so, for what kinds of offenses?

Thanks!