rohitj - 5:32 pm on Dec 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

You also have to realize that many of you are thinking that google can't tell the difference between html, javascript, and meaningful words. If you have the same html/javascripts on each page of a domain, then chances are that's the template of the site--a very large percentage of sites use templates. They are not going to penalize for that and, if they did, they'd be penalizing a very large portion of their index. That blatantly defeats the very purpose of a penalty.

i'm willing to bet that they implement some learning algorithms, that can figure out consistent menus/templates/structural aspects of a site and ignore such aspects when determings the SERPS. Its not a hard thing to do and they have the computing power necessary to crawl each site in that type of depth.