Duplicate Pages

Will my site or page become banned

[JudgeJeffries]

The business I am in generally has two types of operator i.e. those who are qualified and members of a professional organisation that has standards that are rigorously upheld and the rest although some of the rest are OK most are not.
I developed a page of detailed questions that a customer should ask that will identify the rogues and was approached by a number of my competitors for permission to duplicate this page of questions on their sites which I was happy to give to attempt to contribute to driving the rogues out of business. Having just read about Googles duplicate page filter on another string, do I as a result now have a problem.

[Susanne]

Well, if you're only talking about one single page I cannot see how you could be punished for it. The copied pages are not on the same IP address I suppose? And those other pages aren't linking to your site? And all sites having the one page info are all unique?

I think this only becomes a problem when you find many duplicated pages, or even duplicated sites. And when those sites are on the same IP, have very similar design and have obviously been created to boost ranking and traffic.

If you want to be absolutely sure, tell your competitors to edit the text on the page a little. Cheers!

[JudgeJeffries]

I also read on yet another string that a perceived level of about 80% was considered the critical level for banning a page. Is that 80%+ identical will get a page banned or 20%+ identical will get a page banned? Also is it just the page that will not show up if their is a problem or does the whole site get nailed?

[Susanne]

Hi again JudgeJeffries,
I really don't think anybody can give us reliable numbers. Only Google knows. Period. And even if people experiment with pages and sites and manage to reach some kind of "truth", Google can change their algo any time so it won't be of any use anyway.

If you get caught and Google puts a ban on you, the whole site will suffer. Usually your page rank will go down and thereby your "value" compared to the competition. But in your case it sems so unlikely that you would have a problem. I have seen quite a few sites that have several pages of plagiarised content (copied and pasted text straight out of a similar site!) and they are still doing well in Google.