Remedying Duplicate Content Penalties

[Phrankenscents]

Many of my pages have been relegated to the No Title, No Snippet, No SERP status, probably due to a "duplicate content" penalty.

I use a template for creating content. The only differing code and text on each page is related to a different person, let's say, a rock star.

So on each rock star's page the star's name is inserted into a specific spot in the title, into an H2 tag at the top of the page and at various (but same) points within a few paragraphs of copy on the page and in a bolded keyword/alternative spelling bank of words at the bottom. In addition there is an affiliate link or two to products related to the "rock star".
Also, to try and expedite indexing of newer such pages, I interlinked most of the pages to each other.

For a few weeks I was getting good results, with all of these pages having full titles, snippets and appearing where they should in the SERPs. Around mid- June traffic plummeted. Doing a site:mysite.com search, I discovered that the pages were in the index but only with the URL and "similar pages" link.

So, my questions are:

-Is this indeed a penalty as I suspect?
if so, what exactly was responsible for such penalty?

-What can be done at this point to remedy this?

Thanks

[Phrankenscents]

So, more specifically, what is it about these template based pages I'm creating, which differ in the name of the "rock star" on each one, that is tripping off the dup penalty? Do I have to come up with a new design/navigation scheme for each "rock star" page? That seems kind of ridiculous. Can I tweak the existing pages to make them "more different" from each other or must I create all new pages in order to have them reconsidered for proper (functional) listing? TIA

[nancyb]

Are you saying that the only difference on the template pages is the "star's" name in various places? Is there no other text offering unique information about the specific "star"? If so, then I would think this might be a duplicate penalty.

You don't need to change the structure or navigation (many people use templates as a base), but add some unique content applicable to each "star" - age, height, weight, hair color ... ;)

[eggerda]

Phranken -

I have the same deal going on with one of my sites. It is either one of two things (I believe).

These pages are 4 clicks down from the homepage. Homepage is a PR5, so I think google is not reading them because they are so deep in the navigation.

I am going to do an overhaul of the site that does a couple different things. 1, I am going to recategorize the site so that the bulk of these pages (over 10,000 of them) are only 2 or 3 clicks away.

2, I am going to implement a solution where I can make all of the texts unique on each page while substituting in the proper keywords for each phrase in the right spots.

I think this will fix the problems with the snippets and ranking. The pages still have PR, so I don't think it is a "bad" penalty. I belive that once google sees the changed pages, and they are all unique, it place the pages in the rankings.

Anybody have any further ideas?

Thanks,

Dan

[MrSpeed]

I don't think you're getting a duplicate content penaly for using templates. I essentially use templates for every site I have ever built becasue I use includes for the header/footer/navigation etc.

I would make sure you have a few unique paragraphs for each page though. And even better make sure it just isn't copied from bios on Rolling Stone, MTV or IMDB.

[Phrankenscents]

thanks nancyb, well, it's actually done where I've built a 5 page microsite for each star...each profile has similar elements. Each of the star microsites live at an address with the following hierarchy and have the content described:

starname.mydomain.com - unique picture, same multi paragraph copy except for unique starname inserted in specific (same) spots.

starname.mydomain.com/bio - unique star specific 3-4 paragraph biography
starname.mydomain.com/news - links to news on the star
starname.mydomain.com/albums - photos and links to albums
starname.mydomain.com/links - other links on the web about the star

Google had indexed and listed all of the pages for each microsite profile, but now only the main starname.mydomain.com URL (w no snippet and no SERP) shows in a search on "starname.mydomain.+com"

[nancyb]

Phrankenscents, I don't know anything about optimizing and ranking for subdomains, so can't give any advice.

However, that said, my question is why did you make a subdomain for each star and include just 5 pages in it? Have you read Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [google.com]?

This is still as good as the day Brett wrote it and has helped a great many people here.

[walkman]

"probably due to a "duplicate content"

or probably due to many subdomains like you said on the other post.

[Nuttakorn]

Does Google decrease the value on the website which have some duplicate content but not all in the site? How can I do if your site has been duplicated content penalties? Do they have any method to check it?

[MovingOnUp]

I'm in a similar situation. I have many pages that appear to have been penalized due to duplicate content. I do have original content as well, and provide a true value to the end user, but apparently it wasn't enough.