pete - 2:32 pm on Nov 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

Clickthinker, I'll try to summarize your situation - shout if I get it wrong:

1)You have a range of products (Tour 1, Tour 2).
2)You have a number of categories (Destination 1, Destination 2)
3)Often, the same products overlap in the various categories,

As a result, a large percentage of the product pages are identical (regardless of which category they fall in) or as close as butter is to margarine.

Regarding your experiences with:
Altavista.com - How similar is the link structure on these pages? I would bet that you have been featured and then dropped because the link structure from one page to another is what Altavista would regard as too close for comfort, hence you have lost your listing.

Google.com - How many pages in Google have been listed, if any? This is circumstantial, but I strongly believe that Google has got a method whereby they check a collection of the pages on a site to determine duplication and then penalise the site. I think this may have happened to you. So, its more then one page against another - its patterns accross a number of pages.

Be interested to get more feedback from you and some of the others. There have been loads of discussions regarding duplicate content but I am still not sure whether we have found out what counts as being sufficiently dissimilar to avoid penalty.