Unknown Google Filter?

Does Google penalize for dup. content within a site?

[insyte1]

Google traffic has dropped dramatically on three of my sites. In each case the PR and backlinks are still in place, but traffic from Google has plummeted to about 10% of what it used to be.

I'm guessing it is some sort of penalty.

The only common factor between these 3 sites (besides the fact that they have a link to each other as "Affiliated Sites" of mine) is that I've been useing a format to expand the keyword reach.

So a page might be repeated several times with different sets of keywords in the title and down one side of the page, but the rest of the copy stays the same. I would have several hundred pages like that.

I was under the impression that "duplicate content" on different sites is penalized, but not within a site.

But obviously there is something here that Google doesn't like.

What sort of filter could it be?

[Brett_Tabke]

no - google does not penalize a site for dup content. It will penalize a page.

[bekyed]

Hi Insyte,

If its the site in your profile, the links down the bottom left do not work, far too many annoying pop ups and yes the pages are duplicates. Google does not penalise sites for duplication that is true, but with all the duplicates you have, this can look like a whole site to google. this will not help your rankings at all.

Bek.

[NLightN]

Brett - does G consider it dup. page content only if the code is exactly the same?

Thx

[skuba]

It seems that the whole duplicate content concept is very vague.
Many sites offers the same information or the same products. All affiliate sites offer something that other affiliate sites offers. So, how can we protect out sites.

I had a site recently going from 80k pages to 25k pages on google. BUT the pages that are still listed have no Title or description. So my traffic went down 95%.

What exactly triggers a page to be of duplicate content? And duplicate compared to which other? a duplicate needs to have a similar, right? So who is the one considered the remainder? the unique?

Thanks

[Swash]

What you described is mass-produced doorway pages and yes it is likely that you have been penalised for this tactic.

[wanna_learn]

Skuba
Agree with you
I asked the below question in another thread too, but got no response.

What is Duplicate content? - could you please tell...out of below..which cases invite that Duplicate Content Penalty?
1- Exactly Mirrored .... same HTML
2- Same Content, same Design, same navigation...but Title and H1 change
3- Same Content, different Design and Layout (plus hosted with same company)
4- Same Content, different Design and Layout (plus NOT hosted with same company)
5- Content with Tweak, but Same Design and Layout
any other case?

[skuba]

What is Duplicate content? - could you please tell...out of below..which cases invite that Duplicate Content Penalty?
1- Exactly Mirrored .... same HTML
2- Same Content, same Design, same navigation...but Title and H1 change
3- Same Content, different Design and Layout (plus hosted with same company)
4- Same Content, different Design and Layout (plus NOT hosted with same company)
5- Content with Tweak, but Same Design and Layout
any other case?

wanna learn, very good question.....

[d_stew]

I think anything listed in your five will get you a penalty. I try to make sure no two pages have more than 20-25% duplicate text. The design and architecture are both non-issues. It's the text you should be concerned with.

[bekyed]

The design and architecture are both issues if a human decided to look at the site after it has been reported, otherwise as you say a spider can only read text.

Bek

[wanna_learn]

"The design and architecture are both issues if a human decided to look at the site after it has been reported, otherwise as you say a spider can only read text."

Should I say ...Spiders can read HTML?

If I have 100 sites hosted on SAME SERVER and have using ALMOST similar text, BUT have 100% similar Design i.e. its reflected in HTML too, e.g. am using xyz.jpg, abc.jpg, 123.gif etc of particular size and at a particular position in all the sites, Can Google be smarter eough to smell the Rat?
- Same Host
- Very similar HTML

We have live examples of Webmasters practising this, so just a thought if it can trip some kinda Penalty?

As far as a Limit of 25-30% Text similarity is concerned...
- what if I use 25% text from 4 diff sites and make my 100% Text outta it?

[somerset]

skuba, what you are saying would lock out all of the many affiliate feed sites that use exactly the same per item description (e.g. Amazon). Do we really think Google is getting this clever? If so, its bye bye to many affiliates, especially those using the direct xml feeds.