Yahoo Duplicate Pages Dilemma.

How do they do it? Do they do it?

[internetheaven]

For weeks now everytime someone has posted a message that said 'avoid duplicate pages' or 'duplicate pages are considered spam' I would nod my head a little and say (quietly) Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

Then today I had a thought - you can't ban duplicate pages.

If Yahoo banned duplicate pages then a devious webmaster (which I generally tend to think like) would simply create several carbon copies of their competitors which would get them either banned or seriously dropped in ranking.
I checked and there are many terms for which their are hundreds of pages of almost identical content (only differences being a short intro and a couple of links). You can check yourself, the easiest way is to search for tutorials as there are thousands of 'copy and paste' duplicates of each.

All those who have been bashing on about duplicate pages being banned for so long, have I misunderstood you? As far as I can see, Yahoo can't remove pages that are duplicated as they can't always be sure that they are not removing the original. The only way around it is to judge the duplications purely on inbound links.

[martinibuster]

If Yahoo banned duplicate pages...

Well, I know for a fact that Yahoo does not ban duplicate pages (by duplicate I mean duplicate content). There are other variables, as you mentioned, to help determine rank, like titles, links, page structure, etc. that are going to pull in there and differentiate that site to certain degrees.

I say I know because many resellers copy the content verbatim from the original site and there's been no impact in ranking for all the parties involved.

It's hard to distinguish if a certain page is devalued because of off-page factors or some kind of duplicate page devaluation. I'm leaning toward off-page factors having more of an impact than any duplicate content penalties of devaluations.

Here's why:
Yahoo is using ranking methodologies with a basis in Link Popularity (do the Misearable Failure search). Now, if you search on Yahoo for "Adobe Acrobat" you will find the first two results are for Adobe Reader, a wrong result that has been warped by inbound links.

If you search on Google, only the first result is wrong, and the second result gets it right.

Google has been working hard to eliminate duplication within it's serps, and this is a good demonstration of it. Yahoo still needs to catch up in this regard.

Nevertheless, I'd say that G and Y are neck and neck, with Google having a slight advantage in catching duplicates.