pontifex - 12:22 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

hey caveman,

nice outline of the problem. Please allow me to be the devil's advocat here, just for argumentation reasons:

1st: Did you structure the clients site from the beginning to create a lot of subpages, or does the kind of information FORCE you to structure it like that?

Background idea of that provocative question:

If you pretend, that google is very smart and not broken - their filter maybe a very good one by concept. If you have some "bees", which have (eg) 200 words of information and only 15 words (color, function, region) differently, your 3 subpages per bee are highly redundant and your site might be not structured well.

Means: your previous top position in Google was undeserved, because you have highly redundant pages around 1 topic, which could be on 1 page, not 4. The 3 pages around that one topic (long tail, as you said) gave 3 backlinks to the main page, I presume. That boosted the main page up - artificially though.

From what you describe, I am even more sure, that the dupe filter especially applies to dupe pages interlinking, fighting the effect, that people try to spin off more pages from one content source, creating "on-site linkfarms" (can I trademark that, pls?).

2nd:

In any case, I refuse. Talk about rigging sites simply for the purpose of ranking. That's exactly what we're NOT supposed to be doing.

Still wearing the devil's advocate hat: Google does not care, why you created 4 very simliar pages around 1 bee. You look like a optimized site (and honestly: I guess you are) which works with artificial internal link touring on duplicate content. If that structure is template driven, I would tweak it!

Conclusion:
IMHO has google all rights to do with their product whatever they want and kick out whoever they want. If you want to rank good, adjust to that. Guess you have found out all "how tos" to avoid the dupe content penalty. Seeing like that: you are "rigging" the site for the user, if they can find the info better afterwards and NEVER for google.
I want to rank high in Google, so my potential users can find me: I am not optimizing for Google, I optimize for my users, because they use google :-)

Cheers,
Pontifex

Regards from a wodka lemon drinking person next to me ;-)