Is tabular data with less content a duplicate page

A concern when creating a new page

[AjiNIMC]

Hi,

I have few pages where I will put plain data in tabular form. Example

page1
--------
Comapny1.html

Name : jkjk
Phone :
Percentange: 10
blah 1: 20
blah 2: 40

(Users are suppose to comment , it make take some time for customers to start commenting on it)

page2
--------
Comapny2.html

Name : abch
Phone :
Percentange: 12
blah 1: 23
blah 2: 44

(user notes)

So right now the pages are not having much in differnce and looks like similar pages, will it hurt?

Thanks
AjiNIMC

[goodroi]

Yes it will hurt to some degree. Having a templated page with very little difference in the html is not good. Think about it from a lazy search engine spider perspective. If 90% of the html is identical, why not assume the pages are identical and thus penalize it. There is one search engine in particular that strongly applies this filter.

The visible text should be unique and the html as a whole should also be different.

[DerekH]

By placing as much of the (common) formatting as possible into CSS and then placing the CSS in an external file, you can greatly increase the percentage of "code that changes" to "code that doesn't" and move yourself away from a duplicate filter.

Whether you believe such a filter is "soft" or "hard", increasing the ratio of changed to unchanging code is a good thing.
DerekH

[AjiNIMC]

but when I am placing the data in tables, search engine should recognize such possibilty in any business.

I have added user notes and also planning to work more on user notes to get more contents for each page. I donot think it will hamper my site's ranking, may be the duplicate pages will be filtered out.

but you can never be sure with search engines.

Regards
AjiNIMC

[DerekH]

Although a previous poster mentioned that "one search engine in particular will penalize this", this is really the Google forum, and I think Google's behaviour has been well-documented.
Certainly I had, for long and complicated reasons, two pages that were identical. Well, let's be honest, they were exactly the same page, accessible in two ways.
The subsidary copy vanished from Google and the main copy ranked entirely as I'd expect. Occasionally I'd see the "second copy" appear in the SERPS with a fresh date and then it'd be gone again.

That behaviour seemed very reasonable and suited me. The "banned" paged wasn't banned - it reappeared when I disentangled the redirection that my ISP had put there.

So duplication at the page level might be nothing more than a nuisance that one of the pages isn't searchable in Google...
DerekH

[brixton]

"The visible text should be unique and the html as a whole should also be different"
come on now ,are you serious?i know thousands of pages in travel and hotel industry that repeating the same thing and they are on top of search engines years now.Does anyone else agree?

[AjiNIMC]

come on now ,are you serious?i know thousands of pages in travel and hotel industry that repeating the same thing and they are on top of search engines years now.Does anyone else agree?

I too agree and I have seen the article submission sites doing well at many times, they have almost all articles repeated on many sites.

Duplicate page penalty is for a page than for a site, Google says I wont show you two pages identical, thats it.

Thanks
AjiNIMC