I just found your blog through Google.

There’s been a lot of confusion going around the internet today about the issue of duplicate content. I came across a webmasterworld thread where many testified that Google can really put your pages out of indexed. Some guess it’s some sort of algorithm concerns since even the original site has been deindexed too. If this is the case then it won’t be long to find out your competitors had just copied your contents seeking reasons to bring you down.

1) Two domains dressing up identical content to pass them off as unique content to Google.

2) A domain with similar but unique content pages.

Google would benefit from focusing on case 1 and ignoring case 2.

Your site’s TBPR 2 is deceiving because you have enough PageRank to get 500+ pages indexed, but the home page TBPR isn’t reflecting that because from what I see (quick glance, mind you), your internal pages don’t link back up to the home page.

For example, my page has 27 pages with Villas for sale in Sotogrande, and yet I am still rakning #1 on google for the keywords “chalet en venta en sotogrande” and it’s listing one result which it deems the most appropiate.

This being accomplished with a homepage with maximum page rank of 2 which is extremely low.

Even stranger is the fact I’ve only recently started to rank so high on google for these keywords. Since my website is a Real Estate site and we have many properties listed with very similar or the same descriptions it’s normal to be duplicate, however, it would still be bad to delist our pages from our index because they provide a very valuable service to people looking for property in this area.

What googe might be doing is also comparing similar pages on your site with similar pages on other sites. Supposing you have a page about bees which is smiliar to other pages on your site about other types of bees but wikipedia also has a similar page about those bees as do other pages, then I suppose google will only list the best site and ingore all others related to the original topic, in this case, bees. In my case, though I may have 30 virtually exact pages about something, if there aren’t many pages on the internet with that then google will still index and list those results. At least this is the explanation I have now for what I am observing.

According to my tracker script, you asked Google “is there a duplicate content penalty” :D

Some people will tell you there’s no internal dupe penalty, that those pages just get filtered out of results. Vanessa Fox in particular said Google is pretty good at detecting dupe content and that webmasters should not worry about any penalties.

But like Adam said, I believe the penalty exits, albeit only in extremely rare cases. He didn’t say “Hey, it’s all basically the same junk as the content on another domain!” Instead, he said “it’s all basically the same junk on every page!”

Just found your site via Google - so I guess you don’t have any penalties going on :P

A very interesting read. I don’t know if you watch their videos, but whenever WebProNews has Google people on they usually say the penalty either doesn’t exist, or that it only exists for purely content-stealing sites. I’m actually thinking of writing a post up about it over at my blog, still have to do more research into it though :(

Nice blog.

Thanks for dropping by =) I’ll see ya around in Google Groups.

Didn’t know you had a blog, but very happy to find it and now subscribed :mrgreen:

Rgds

Richard (Red Cardinal)