caveman - 4:58 pm on Oct 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

zeus, FYI, internal site filtering and/or the motivations behind it have been around for a long time now. It has long been more a question of what/how, than "if".

Back at some conference in '02 I think, a Google engineer was noted as saying that exact duplication will not cause sites many problems. (Google will simply try not to show exact dup pages in any given SERP.) Reason: There is a ton of exact duplication around the Web - think of works by great poets or writers for example, or political/historical documents.

The issue even several years ago was not exact duplication; it was "near duplication" ... too much similarity between pages.

When a substantial number of pages look very similar, it gives the impression that they are either not all worthy of being shown, or have been modestly changed to avoid filters. Again, that was a G engineer talking at a conference, two or three years ago.

My only question now is whether internal site filtering is suddenly taking out ALL similar pages from a given site, rather than just some/most.