* How much do you have to rework original content to make it appear to Google as not duplicate content.

I don’t believe Google has a duplicate content penalty… It has duplicate content filters… Google will treat pages differently if some pages are identical matches and if other are closely matched on the same site. It most likely applies the filter on a page by page basis and a domain by domain basis.

* Why in the heck didn’t Joomlahacks think of this problem?

I have not used Joomla Hacks… But I imagine it is a url rewriting mechanism… If all of the old urls are re-written and suddenly links which were responsible for distributing page rank are no longer in existance… then all of the site is prone to fall into the supplemental index. Redirects need to be in place to catch the incoming association form those old urls to redirect the page rank into the new urls…

* Is there any benefit for SMF purposes in aggregating content into subdomains?

The keywords in a url are important as they are weighted against the content of the pages behind them… for any other purposes it is something I don’t know.

* Could he have got around this problem if he had restricted google from crawling his /forum subdirectory using robots.txt?

I think it is a bad idea to restrict the robots from crawling any of your pages which have content you want indexed. The only reason the robots file should be used is to keep multiple requests to the same page using Googles dynamic url cawling technique to a minimum… So that Google may access more of your content faster rather than different states of your content.

* What do you think about the idea that CMS systems in themselves may lead to supplemental problems?

Free software is loaded with problem and optimizing for search engines is sometimes the last thing on a programmers mind.

I have yet to see an OSCommerce template in use in a site which I frequent… I feel they do very pporly with search engines in general… same goes for phpBB… There is something wrong with these freeware solutions and my first guess is that the lack of unique structure of the templates causes a duplicate content filter of sorts… which moves people to the back of the line as far as search results go…

This is highly speculative of course.

My Mind will change tomorrow I am sure…

MrGamma wrote:
> dockarl1998 wrote:
> > OK - Keep it coming people - lets get to the bottom of this..

Are your 7 sites with a PR 1 directory style or link farm style sites
or do they all have original content?

Do these sites have a recurring keyword which binds them together or
are they a mash of different topics? ( Keyword frequency throughout the
entire site )

Have you associated yourself with similar themed sites?

Do any of these pages in the supplemental have dead ends… No Outbound
links?

Is your keyword density too high or is your original content low…
have you used available freeware CMS software without making any
modifications to the templates?

Have you answered yes to any of these questions? Then you fail and go
into the supplemental index…

we have the same problem too… I’m thinking this might also have something to do with pagerank? I have some blogs with low page rank that have big probs with supplementals, but my higher pagerank blogs have no such prob - same wordpress install…