Three Identical Pages Treated Differently?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

On my website I have three separate pages showing portfolio examples and testimonials. The first ranks well and it has PR4, the second has a grey bar and the third has PR3.

All three are several years old, built from the same template and they have very similar content. It is not a major problem for me but I was wondering if there was anything to be learned from this. I have checked each of the pages and I cannot find any reason for this. Any ideas?

[aristotle]

What happens if you do Google searches for keywords that are relevant to all three pages? Do all three pages appear somewhere in the results?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Yes, they all appear.

[aristotle]

That's interesting. So there's no filtering from the SERPs for near-duplicate content in this case. But is it possible that they hurt each other's rankings?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Each of the pages has different content so that should not be an issue.

[goodroi]

I am confused. If the pages are identical, how do they have different content? Also you do not mention how many external and internal backlinks point to each specific page.

Having different backlinks pointing to pages with different content would explain for different treatment by Google.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

They are three portfolio pages all of which have the exact same structure. They include feature boxes where I display testimonials and links to client's websites. The structure is the same but the content of each feature box is different.

Page 1 external links 88 internal links 60 (PR4)
Page 2 inbound links 46 internal links 56 (grey bar)
Page 3 inbound links 27 internal links 55 (PR3)

[goodroi]

Having the same structure and template really does not mean they are identical. Google's algorithm is heavily influenced by links and content. If a page has more links or even a handful of higher quality links and a good combination of keywords it can significantly outperform a similar page that does not have those links and/or keyword combinations.