Here is another instance of "Bing gets it right, why can't Google?"
I run a helpdesk-like system where users can submit their questions related to a certain type of devices and get good answers, both researched and from experience, provided by yours truly and other people. The site overall is moderately well ranked for related terms but it isn't the only way people can get help on these devices on the Net. Most obvious of them being - they can ask around on forums.
Some of those are extremely well-established and old forums that deserve to rank higher than my site. However, what happens is: if a person asks the exact same question (which then becomes the title of the page on all sites where he asked) on a forum and then on my site (I think sequence matters - forum first, my site second) - my site's page never comes up for this particular question, despite the fact that beyond the first post and the title, everything else on the page is different.
I guess it should be open for debate which of them is better but the end result is that my page never sees the light of day even though both pages deserve to be listed because they both have serious and useful (and different!) info.
Needless to say, Bing lists both right next to each other although the old forum's page, despite having fewer responses and less info, is above mine - they are #1, I'm #2. No question about that - the old forum has enormous amount of IBLs and other site quality signals, regardless of that the particular page says.
Google, on the other hand, lists the old forum's page at #1 and *less relevant* page of my site at #2 and only because my less relevant page has a link to the correct page and the anchor text is the title of that question.
Anyhow, guys, sorry for the long winded question, but it is not the first occurrence and I'm afraid this may become a common situation: a person asks a question in a forum. Gets little or non-satisfactory answers. Then (in a couple of days) copies and pastes the title and the actual question into my helpdesk hoping to get a better answer.
He'll get the answer but now everyone else searching for the same question will only see the forum's page, the one with less info on it. My page will never come up for that search because there's a 2-days older page out there with the same title and same first few paragraphs of the content.
This is not a question of indexing: both sites get their new pages indexed in minutes. It is probably more of a question regarding Google's approach to identifying the original source of content, and then sticking to their guns despite the fact that most of that content is different except for the title and first couple paragraphs. As they re-crawl, the pages get more and more different but their definition of original source seems to be set in stone?
Any creative ideas about dealing with this kind of user-generated duplication? Seems detrimental even when duplication is only partial.
