jdMorgan - 3:51 pm on Oct 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

> dupe content penalties.

Unless there is duplication across a massive number of URLs, I see no evidence of any penalties -- Most of the talk of penalties is simply fear and unreasonable doubt. Many if not most "home pages" can be reached by no less than 8 different URLs -- www versus non-www, "/index.htm" versus "/", FQDN- versus non-FQDN-format domain, etc., so it would be folly if Google or another SE tried to penalize a site based solely on "same content at more that one URL."

They might indeed do this, but only if the duplication is massive, and there are are unmistakable indications that the duplication was done intentionally. But applying true penalties for duplicate-content would affect a large majority of sites on the Web, because those sites' owners have made no effort whatsoever to force domain and URL canonicalization -- and indeed, probably have never even heard of those terms.

What *does* happen is that the two (or more) URLs compete against each other for links and other ranking factors; If their content is very similar and competition in the target market is fierce, then this competition can naturally push both URLs down in the SERPs. It's an over-simplification, but if you split the "ranking power" of essentially the same "page" across multiple URLs, then the potential rank of that "page content" gets divided among the URLs, and must therefore be lower than it would otherwise be if the page-content was totally unique and existed at only one URL.

Point being, it's not an SE-imposed "penalty" specifically aimed at your sites, but rather the natural consequence of the fact that search engines work based on URLs, the content found at those URLs competes against all similar content on the Web, and a single-character change in what you see in your browser address bar makes it a completely-different URL.

Jim