Duplicate content - how does it work?

[kelleybelly]

I was wondering how duplicate content works within a site. I sell different products but there is a lot of the same text with a certain category of my items explaining how to order. I just checked copyscape one page agains another similar item and it shows 92$ similar. Could that be a reason why the pages are not indexed any more. Also the catefory that these items are found under is not indexed anymore either. My site has been ranking since 2000 top 10 positions. It is not spammy at all. Its just that to explain how to order a set of something, template text is necessary. Any help would be appreciated. Thank You

[kelleybelly]

Okay, I miscalculated, Not only is that one category not being indexed slowly my entire site is being de-indexed. For my categores when I paste in the url to google, The cache's are from August 2004 . So I think it is slowly dropping my site. Could it be either a penalty or new code, a table I added for the category navigation in May of 2005? I have no idea but I do not think google is crawling my site anymore but am not convinced it is a penalty.

[tedster]

Check through the technical issues that are discussed in these threads. I'll bet you can find something:

Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]

On those 92% similar pages -- make sure that they at least have unique titles and meta descriptions - as dissimlar as you can come up with. That can work wonders.

[Lorel]

why not put your order instructions on one page and just link to it instead of repeating it on too many pages?