Duplicate Content Problems or Sandbox?

[sgsurvey]

Hi everyone,

I am very new and I start my site on 26 May, it's about <widgets>.
I am not good at english so writing content is like killing me, then i copied a few articles from one of the top <widgets> website and paste as my contents (of course we provide our services, too)

So far, the site jumped to PR3 since the july google update and ranked at 1 million over at Alexa.

It's CSS and html, no tables, all the tags are carefully designed (well, i admit i use some hidden text by applying css disply:none, in order to get more keyword density, however, the hidden text is less than 30% on each page).

Now, the site is ranking near top in MSN and Yahoo for almost all my keywords(it's country targetted), however, in google, no news. I can only find my site on a few very minor keywords (no competition at all).

The backlinks, google shows 8 only, yahoo shows 85 and msn shows 139 ... and more than 50% of the pages (total: 40+ ) are indexed by every of them.

I really don't know if my site is still in sandbox or not? (as i can see my site on those non-competing keywords, so i doubt) or I was penalized by google because i use display:none or duplicated content?

Please help!

[edited by: ciml at 10:56 am (utc) on July 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Widgetised. [/edit]

[WebFusion]

would having the same Title and Meta Description for each page on my site potentially hurt my rankings?

I doubt it, as long as the majority of the content on each page is unique. having said that, ti certainly won't help you either.

My question is....why on earth do you want to duplicate titles on every page? Why not name each page individually?

[Phil_AM]

Thanks WF. I wouldn't necessarily say I wanted it that way, sort of a glitch in the code that I didn't realize until last week. (God knows how long its been like that).

My Serps got hit hard first week of August and I'm struggling to figure out why...

Any input on the tracking url?

[caveman]

would having the same Title and Meta Description for each page on my site potentially hurt my rankings?

Yes.

[etrader]

Hi, I have created my own review pages myself from scratch, however I have copied feature lists from amazon - they are in the form

aperture item
shutter speed item
power soucre item

ect - these are pretty hard to change imo and be original

Will I have duplicate problems with this data?

[nfinland]

I searched the forum and used Google, but did not find any clear answer to if search engine friendly URLs can trigger a duplicate content filter. And if they might how can you prevent this?

Anyone?

[Webdetective]

What kind of violations are unforgivable resulting in a permanent ban?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

<What kind of violations are unforgivable resulting in a permanent ban? >

This is off topic but let's let Google answer it ...

"Alternately, your page may have been manually removed from our index if it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed, and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. You may want to review our Quality Guidelines for more guidance. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try "cleaning up" the page and contacting us with a re-inclusion request. We do not give any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site. "