I'll try to make this brief. My site sells product (rugs) and I really want the product to appear quickly to the user. In order to make web page creation easier I created a .net reusable control called "display case" that can easily be placed on many web pages and it loads product based on varibles sent into it. This site was built using Microsoft .net.

Thus begins my duplicate content question. I had a webpage that did not have this control on the page which ranked fairly well, averaging about 15 in G for about 20 keywords and phrases. I decided that I would put the control on the page, thus making more product visible to customers. After doing so the page dropped in Google SERPs (like a rock) averaging about 150 in G for the same keywords and phrases. Yahoo and MSN positions were unaffected.

I would guess this is because the "display case" was also found on four other pages on the site and the page with the "display case" newly added obtained a duplicate content penalty. I am no expert and this is just my guess.

The "display case" does display different product depending on the page it is on but it does have duplicate content such as size and price and keywords in the alt tags of product images.

Since noticing this I have removed the display case from the main page to avoid any issue and I'm waiting to see if this improves my rankings.

My question are, am I correct in thinking that duplicate content can cause such a loss in rankings? Also, where can I find some guidelines regarding duplicate content within a domain?

Thanks for reading!

TRP

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The Rug Pile

Personally, I doubt it had anything to do with the drop unless there was very little unique content to each page.

Question though, if the products are different based on the page why would the alts be duplicated... other than the word rug?

Have you tried some basic attempts in making your pages unique? Such as having the products items name, the titles and description tags created anew for each page created?

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My suspicion would be, and hence the reply... yes, he was talking about a block of duplicated text in a unique page.

I'm guessing though that if he hasn't checked back in since 4/8 that it couldn't be too pressing. (smiley here)

Dilligaf, I think your answer was spot on and that my block of duplicate content was causing some pretty interesting Google penalties. I'm finding that proper SEO to some degree actually goes against programing code reuse because you can't drop reusable objects on all of your pages. If you do, you can get the duplicate content issues.

As a database guy I log my ranking positions for about 110 keywords and phrases across Google, MSN, and Yahoo. I log the positions of the keyword over time so I have a great idea of where they rank and what site changes may have impacted them.

After removing the duplicate content and making a few other site changes my keyword rankings went sky high. I rank rather well in MSN for a ton of keywords. I also am ranking better in Google than I ever have before.

My top 20 Google keywords average a rank about 11.2 and my top 20 MSN keywords rank average is about 2.5.

Mostly this was done with on page SEO as there are few links to the site.

Just for fyi with the duplicate content issue installed on the website on purpose the drop in Google for the average of the top 20 keywords is about 130.

Can anyone answer my question in the other thread about link directories?

thanks!

TRP

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TRP
The Rug Pile