duplicate content penalty?

Confused

[videoink]

The recent Google indexing has played havoc with our site listings. Investigated our competitors who are ranked 1-2 and third on certain keywords.

They seem to have duplicate homepages-one is named index.html and the other is named the same as their page title loaded with keywords. They have made keyword laden page.html their default homepage and maintained their index.html with the exact same content?
How can this be if Google is penalizes sites for duplicate content, seems as though they are rewarding it here?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

[errorsamac]

I am pretty sure duplicate content is only an issue where the same content is displayed on more than one domain. For example, if they own www.example.com and www.example.net and both of those domains show the same exact thing, then that is duplicate content. But having two .html files with the same content under the same domain (such as example.com/index.html and example.com/page.html) is NOT duplicate content.

[alexo]

>> But having two .html files with the same content under the same domain (such as example.com/index.html and example.com/page.html) is NOT duplicate content.

are u sure?

in this case why to use 301 redirect (from non www version to www) if this isn't non dup content.

[SebastianX]

Do not trick search engine spiders into indexing the same content from multiple URIs. Put your exotic file formats in directories excluded by robots.txt, on HTML pages use the robots meta tag to prevent duplicate content from beeing indexed. Tell the spiders to index the page of your choice as seen by users. If you need to use redirects, your architecture is crap or you're dealing with a legacy system.

[errorsamac]

Technically, example.com and www.example.com are different domains (www is a subdomain of example.com). I probably should have clarified what I meant earlier. But, as far as I know, if you have www.example.com/index.html and www.example.com/page.html and they have the same contents, you will not get penalized. But like SebastianX said, do not try to trick search engines.

[jinx]

Remember doorway pages? What was that about?
10000 pages with links and what else, content? nope, duplicated content.
If the content wasn't duplicated or similar through all of the 10000 pages it wouldn't be treated as a spam.

be sure.

[powerfulponder]

Duplicate content on the same domain is something to avoid.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[sailorjwd]

video,

A you sure these aren't hidden homepages or doorway pages served up to the G bot but never seen by visitors?

[alexo]

Hello

it's for webmasters, who use or are going to use Pmachine CMS (btw as i know it's included in CPanel/Fantastico on lot of hosts)

don't use this CMS.
regarding from where u try to access this articles, it's generate the same article with different url, (search, main page, archive, etc)

like this:
domain.com/more/1_0_1_0_M/
domain.com/more/1_0_1_0_C/
domain.com/more/A1_0_1_0_M/
domain.com/more/P1_0_1_0_M/
domain.com/more/1_0_1_0_M1/

[videoink]

Thanks for your posts, I have determined my assessment was incorrect. But thank you for the duplicate page info! Helpful as we move forward.