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I've just redone my site to eliminate question marks where content is unique and distinct to any human reader. I'm wondering if it was worth my effort though, because the differences within pages of the same template are mostly numbers. There's also a significant amount of text in navigation.
So I'm wondering what Google will make of it. I know Google attempts to separate the template from the dynamic content. I also know (from searching for Perl-related things) that a search can bring up the same content on many sites. But similar content on one site?
Does this both affect the decision on whether to index a page and the ranking it gets?
Does this both affect the decision on whether to index a page and the ranking it gets?
Google will most likely index only 1 page if 2 or more pages are (almost) identical. I doubt it will influence the ranking of the page that is indexed. Needless to say, those that are not indexed will not rank at all.
Some months ago someone else here reported problems with getting some membership-pages indexed. If I recall correctly, there was a lot of similar content, and only the URL, name and registration number were different for each page. So you would think that if the difference is small in relation to the total word count, Google will decide the pages are similar.
