Can a portion of a TLD be penalized?

Can G impose penalties on SECTIONS of a site?

[stuntdubl]

I have a program generated sitemap, and since one portion of my site had the same title for every page, there is quite a bit of the same link text (50 or so). I just noticed that the pages are now PR0. Not sure if it is because they are two directories deep (on a pr4 site), but wondering if a penalty can be imposed on just a SECTION of a site anyhow.

Any info on this?

[troels nybo nielsen]

A couple of weeks ago there were some threads with webmasters who believed that their main pages and _only_ their main pages had been penalized. If you dig down and read those threads you may find something useful.

[mil2k]

PR 0 is not a PR penalty IMHO . When you have a greyed PR then that can be assumed as a PR penalty. And yes only sections of TLD can be penalized. HTH

[sullen]

I was one of those webmaster worrying about a penalty on one page only of a site. The thread is this one:
[webmasterworld.com ].

It may not be very helpful as we didn't really come to any conclusions, but you may like to know that sections of sites do appear to be penalised sometimes.

Like Mil2k says though, PR0 is not necessarily a penalty (may be just be PR of less than 1, or less than 0.5 if Google rounds figures fairly)

[ciml]

> Can a portion of a TLD be penalized?

I'm certain that portions of dmoz.org have had penalties for linking to bad neighbourhoods (or by using a word that Google didn't like at the time). So yes.

If you have a bunch of very similar pages, then I think that Google is more likely to merge them than penalise you.

I suspect that it has more to do with the site structure, or even timing.