The_Contractor - 2:42 pm on Aug 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

reading between the lines then would you say a hand edited directory that uses a search engines xml feed for sponsored links gets caught in the trap then

Personally I can't say what you should do. Whatever works for you works. If you can throw up a feed and make money on it that's fine. If you get hit down the road only you can decide if it was worth it or not. The thing is you shouldn't complain when/if you do.

What would I do? If I had a script on part of a site that used a PPC plug-in for search results or returned info from a feed I would not allow it to be crawled. I would try to attract visitors and rank with other original content and then steer them into using the part of the site that has those features.

Those that use substantial duplicate content (ODP, scraped, newsgroups, feeds) or multiple domains containing basically the same content as 100's of other sites need to rethink their strategy imho. Again, if it works, ride it out as long as you can. Also, I keep hearing from people stating that it doesn't bother Yahoo a bit. This thread and the complaints are about being dropped from Google – not Yahoo. I can search for almost anything on Yahoo and see complete duplicate content/sites taking at least the whole 1st page of results. It's irrelevant as the topic is about what Google has decided to do. If I had duplicate sites taking up the top two pages of Yahoo I would simply block Googlebot from those domains.

Can I ask a simple question (rhetorical) from those including duplicate content (ODP, scraped, newsgroups, feeds) or multiple domains containing basically same content?

Why did you use the feed on your site?
Why did you use the ODP on your site?
Why did you use the newsgroups on your site?
Why did you use the scraped results on your site?
Why did you use the same content on multiple sites?

I can answer the above. Because it was fast/easy..period. If you had to build out all of that content by hand (even if you simply had to retype it or copy/paste) it wouldn't be on your site no matter how useful it is to the user. Again, I'm not judging anyone, but your common sense should tell you that if it works at all, it won't for long.

I am not saying you are incorrect in your findings, I haven't access to the list of sites you looked at. I can however state that Google has a major problem handling sites on shared IP addresses.

Yes, these were all controlled or setup by the same person/people.