Duplicate content between domains. Can a few pages tank your site?

Duplicate content issues on coomon pages between domains

[Whitey]

We have three regional sites with the same brand. One is pumping traffic the other two are as dead as the proverbial "Do Do" for over one year.

Although we thought that duplicate content issues were fixed we do have the same URL structure and also link to common pages on one domain like "About Us" , "Newsletter" , 2-3 common conditions pages etc.

-Each site has around 50k pages
-Apart from the above, non of the other pages are interlinked.

Would Google see this as enough to group the sites together and label them duplicate content?

[MThiessen]

I really don't thnk so, if the content is all original on each one.

But here is a possiblity. Maybe a human at google looked at it, they do sometimes, and determined that even though its not a duplication, perhaps there is nothing "new", the same ole information just re-written, and flagged it as duplicate based on that.

Just a theory..