outland88 - 9:37 pm on Mar 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

To answer your original question Lfgoal it can happen. Cutts suggestion is right but his remarks always seem drawn from hearsay.

The problem you mention can arise from the “mindset” people have in developing web sites among many things. Often times there is similarity in design elements from programs utilized to ideas that people have found quiet successful and used many times. In other words sites may look visually and grammatically different but many astute web designers can tell if the same person developed them. If they can tell some bots can tell. There are hundreds of search engines outside of Google some with rather sophisticated bots. Bots and algos aren’t anywhere as smart as people think they are but the problem is the mistakes they make particularly Google’s. I don’t expect these type mistakes with Yahoo and MSN because they focus more on the numerical incidence of spam or repetitiveness not the actual content per sec. I agree with this. Yahoo and MSN really allow people to make more money because either commerce or content sites can be ranked highly. Google on the other hand attempts to elevate particular type sites to a high ranking based upon an illusive content criteria only really known to them. In other words spam prevention becomes more a by-product.

Bottom line is you have to train the Google bots things are different on each site from the set-up of you navigation links to servers. Google is also not a proactive company with many things. The penalty or filter occurring in one category may be totally non-existent in other categories leading to disagreement among webmasters whether it exists at all. There are things allowed in some categories of Google that were totally driven out of my categories over two years ago. So you’re going to get answers that run the gamut.