Duplicate content

Hi

I have various versions of my home page, each optimised for a different area within london. The content was essentially the same, just changed slightly dependent on the area.

Until the last few weeks I was appearing on page one of Google for various search terms for each additional page. This is no longer the case and although these additional pages are still indexed by Google, they do not appear in the results at all.

Has google changed its rules in the last few weeks/months. Are these additional pages now being treated as duplicate content.

cheers

PJ

If they're the same content, google will keep the first instance it found in the SERPs, and drop the others.

they are probably about 90% duplicate content.

the weird thing is they all showed up well in the resulst for a long time and have just recentky been dropped.

Thanks

PJ

I would recommend the following video from google. It is 14 min long, deals with duplicate pages and I have to say the best video I have seen come out from google ever.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=GoogleWebmasterHelp#p/u/15/6hSoXutuj0g

thanks, I'll check it out.

Guess I just need to re-write the additional pages so they don't fall into the duplicate content trap.

cheers

Paul

Actually, I am not sure about that. Do watch the video!

Sooner or later Google will find the duplicate content, it is better to avoid penalties. Write unique and fresh content.

Not necessarily true... an authority site can steal a piece of content even if the original site has had theirs indexed for a fair amount of time.

This was done a few months ago with the Affiliate Slap

Most affiliate sites have the same content so they all got slapped.

Is it a penalty? no

If you change the content, then you'll come back.
If it were a penalty then you would need to do a reinclusion request.

Either way....you will need to change ALL THE CONTENT on your website...and also make sure you didn't distribute the content across the net or didn't copy the content from another site

Maybe I misunderstood the OP. I thought both instances of the content resides on his site.

not an ideal approach keep the content unique...!

The original question was dealing with duplication of content on the same site... however I was not dealing with the OP's question but rather deviating towards the idea that the first version that is indexed is always chosen as the original which is just not the case.

As far as the original question on the content goes, the problem is "optimizing" instead of targeting. Stop duplicating and optimizing and start delivering unique content.

I agree to a certain extent, but I believe that authority sites are not in the habit of blatant scraping or copyright infringement, but I could be wrong.

Google claims to be improving their safeguards, and I believe that to be true as the operator of several aggregations sites. My sites have higher PR and get spidered more often than my contributing customer's sites do, however my sites are dropped from the SERPs for their article content. This is true 100% of the time in my experience. This may be due to the fact that I follow the rules and link back to the source of the articles however.

Same thinh have also happened to me, i had to delete the duplicates and leave only the original