questions regarding duplicate content

[Stever]

do duplicate content penalties apply to pages within the same domain or just pages with content ripped from other sites?

I am building a few seperate landing pages each targeted to a specific keyword phrase. These pages are more or less identical with slight tweeks here and there. Is this good or bad?

[Rorschach]

Bad, you have to make the textual content substantially different... near duplicate pages are considered worthless to Google's surfers regardless of who made them, so they don't tend to do well. You won't necessarily be penalized, but the pages (or all the pages bar the one that has the best incoming links) won't rank, or will be listed urls only, or dumped in the supplemental cache.

[Bill]

I'd agree with that.

The more variation, the better - this is pretty much an absolute rule.

The actual variation doesn't have to be that huge a percentage, but every bit of variation helps.

With something like "landing pages", the only approach that really works well is to make them actually interesting.

[Stever]

So these landing pages, even if they were original contnet on each, would not have any other incoming links. all incoming go to index page. but the site map points to them so the spiders know they exist. So if they are well optimized for a specific keyword phrase, (filename, title, h1 tags, good sprinkling of keywords in content) should they still get ranked well in SE where the only PR for the actual pages comes from the PR for the main page of the site? Or do i have to get some backlinks heading to these pages?

Been looking at some pages that come up at the top of google for some of the phrases i'm targeting. Some of these have 0 PR but the main page for the site has good PR.

Are these landing pages a good idea or a waste of time? providing i make them more original.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Stever

Are these landing pages a good idea or a waste of time? providing i make them more original.

Well, that's a judgement call. Some people would say don't build such things, but I still do. Altho I don't think of them as "landing pages", I think of them as additional content pages on the site.

They will definitely work best if you make sure to get some incoming links to those pages. At the very least make sure that they are well linked within the site, and try to get some exterior links coming to those pages, either from your other domains, or from a friends domains.

I suggest targeting a few rarer keyphrases on each page. There's a huge 'invisible' body of search traffic that types unusual combinations of keywords into the se's - it's much easier to be #1 to #5 for a rare keyphrase.

IMNSHO, the key issue is tieing your sell point, the link that sends the surfer to the sale, to your keyphrases and traffic. I'd rather have 10 hits from people who typed in something directly connected to my sell than 100 or 1000 hits of random se traffic.

[Halfdeck]

After getting a few pages penalized I assume for similar content in Google and Yahoo, I'm very careful to make sure each page is unique enough to pass the duplicate content checker test (I try for 60% or below, if possible). My first impression was if I change a line or two, then it's cool, but that didn't fly in my case.

When I have a bunch of pages linked to an index page, then I make sure in the long run each one of those pages will get direct hits from SEs. That means more traffic overall, compared with hits going just to the main page, and chances of making a sale imo are better because the visitor doesnt have to work his way through the main page to get to the content page.