added a body of legal code, site disappeared

triggering spam filter?

[rrl]

I took a legal website and added a body of a state's legal code, which added about a 1,000 pages to the site. I added the code within the same graphic wrapper of the rest of the site and made it searchable. However, the site has disappeared when it had been doing very well. Any ideas? Thanks.

[diamondgrl]

This raises a good question as to what is enough similarity to trigger the duplicate content filter.

Obviously there are some differences (the HTML wrapper) but the content was the same as some other site and that probably triggered Google to decide not to list these pages of duplicate content again.

What level of originality is needed to get into the SERPs, I don't know.

[sublime1]

I posted another thread on duplicates recently, with two questions: has the dupe identification changed and is G doing something differently with dupes.

There are lots of other things going on that might have caused your site to get dropped -- are you sure this is the cause? We had a site that was almost completely untouched for several months and wham, it got whacked in the latest update. We're not sure why (perhaps cross-linking?), but it's certainly not duplicate content, and it's gone. Are there other possibilities for the elimination?