ciml - 10:26 am on Aug 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

Marcia:
> Just once actually, but I'd prefer that it be the right one

Assuming that you can't add a robots exclusion meta tag to the other copies of your page, or that you don't want to because they link back; the 'highest PageRank' approach seems to be the only way Google has of choosing at the moment.

Otherwise, as far as I know your only option is to make the pages different enough. Usually, having someone else's header, footer and navbar is more than enough.

Some very close mirrors of pages do make it into Google.

vitaplease:
> ...playing copyright referee if it punished one of the two...

The word 'punished' worries me. The overwhelming impression I get is that Google aren't trying to punish for this, just that they don't want to list a bunch of identical pages for a given search phrase. If they were trying to punish, then surely they wouldn't merge the PageRank.

Pages got the white/grey Toolbar back in December, but that was fixed. Whether it was a penalty or glitch can be debated; I suspect a glitch (or at least something that Google saw as a mistake).