Some duplicate content still gets ranked

addendum to Duplicate Content Observation - within a site

[guitaristinus]

I know of two pages on different sites that are nearly identical showing at positions 1 and 3 for a three word search that has 7,780,000 results. One page is 11336 bytes, the other is 10948 bytes. All the text is the same except for maybe a dozen words. Page Rank on both is 3. One page has adsense on it. Title and header tags are the same.

These pages have existed at the same positions in Google SERPs for over a year.

If there is a duplicate filter/penalty, then how can both of these pages still rank well?

I started this thread not to complain, but to point out that it's impossible for us to know if there is a filter/penalty. All we can do is make assumptions based on our limited views of the web.

Since what we can know about the filter/penalty of duplicate pages is so limited, I would not take much time to redesign a site or add unnecessary verbiage to a page to avoid a possible Google filter/penalty.

In my ongoing website endeavors I think about all the SEO stuff talked about here, including possible filters and penalties. I, too, am assuming there is some kind of duplicate penalty. But I also think about the thousands of duplicate pages that are ranking well.

I understand that I am better able to take risks with my sites than others who have more established domains.

By the way, I've reported these pages along with many other duplicates from these sites to Google. I quit reporting them in March 2005. Another thread? Another reason not to be too concerned about my own nearly duplicate pages.

[robotsdobetter]

There have been many cases where a web site that was full of duplicate content has been kicked out. When I say kicked out I mean there web site was no longer in the index for nothing, not even for their own URL. Most of the time pages with duplicate content are not banned, but just ranked lower, which ever page was found first was the web page that most likely would be ranked the highest.

It's not a very smart move for the search engines to ban a site for duplicate because many web sites, which are useful, have duplicate content on their web site. If you look at many of the news sites on the web they all have some news stories which are the same exact thing as the other.

[soapystar]

yup, seems more to do with similar pages and not to do with duplicate content. There are many examples of this with duplicate pages being shoiwn from the same site. Now if you have a lot of very similar pages but not duplicate you are far more likely to take a hit.