How Does Google Handle Duplicate Content On The Same Site?

If you have duplicate content on your site, what happens?

[eggerda]

Hello,

Last October a large site for a client went live. This site has thousands of product pages, many of which have the exact same text on them in all places, except for that the product number is different, and the 3 word description is different.

Every page is fully indexed in Google, and was pulling in amazing traffic until late February at which point a steady decline in traffic began. Now the site gets about 60% of the traffic it used to get (it declines slightly every day/week).

I think that a penalty or filter is being triggerd where google says "Ok, these 2 pages under this domain are basically the same - must be some sort of spammer, I am not going to rank either page very high".

Does anyone agree with this, or have any similar experiences thoughts? I believe that the way to get the traffic back is to make every page unique.

What do you think?

Thanks for any help/advice.

Dan

[Marcia]

Are all the pages showing in the index with the title and description and in the cache, or do any of them have no snippet/no title and just the URL?

[webtress]

Dan, when you check using the allinurl: go to the very last page of the results, click on the omitted results, there you will find the pages with duplicate content "supplemental resutls" these pages are only called into a result when no other page will qualify to return a result for that query. sticky me the url I'll take a look.

[eggerda]

Are all the pages showing in the index with the title and description and in the cache, or do any of them have no snippet/no title and just the URL?

Dan, when you check using the allinurl: go to the very last page of the results, click on the omitted results, there you will find the pages with duplicate content "supplemental resutls" these pages are only called into a result when no other page will qualify to return a result for that query. sticky me the url I'll take a look.

Marcia -

All pages are showing in the index with index, title, and description. No "just URL" listings show up.

Webtress -

Strange. When I do "allinurl:www.mysite.com" it comes up with like 226,000 pages (the site in question only has about 40,000 pages). I notice that some URL's are not mine, but have www.mysite.com in them somehow.

Anyway, I did this command instead "site:www.mysite.com inurl:www.mysite.com" and got the expected 40,000 results. Once I click to page 15 (150 pages into it) at the bottom I get the "click here for ommited results" thing. I click that and it basically does the search again, and I get all 40,000 and can go page by page thorugh all 40,000 pages until I am blue in the face (till the 40,000th page). I get perfect snippets on every page listing etc...

Does this mean that everything after the first 150 pages that show up with the site inurl command are supplemental results, only served up in the SERPS when no other pages show up for the query term?

I will sticky you my URL so you can have a look.

Let me know.

Thanks,

Dan