Google does NOT ban duplicate sites

[collusion]

A couple days ago I recieved an email from TemplateMonster stating that they were banned by Google for it's affiliate sites being duplicates of the main site. I did a check and found that they were not banned but their PR was reset to 0. Anybody have a view on this find? TemplateMonster has thousands of affiliate sites out there so if they are not banned then I don't know who would get it that hard from having a duplicate site. You will lose your hard earned PageRank and have to start over again but that is about it.

[cbp]

If Google are true to their word, then they do ban for duplicate content (why would they want multiple copies of the same site cluttering up the index?)

The problem then is what is duplicate content? - is it 100% or 95% similar (Google did get patent 2 years ago for the detection of near duplicate content).

I can not see how an affliate can get some site banned, unless it a 302 hijack, or the affilate has an "exact" copy of the site (or at least crossed the threshold as to whats duplicate content)

In this case check:
http://www.templatesmonster.com
http://www.templatemonster.com
...one of them looks like a hijack of the content into frame --- that must be 100%

CBP

[collusion]

It is 100% but it is not banned. Nor is the main site. The only thing that happened is their PR dropped from 8 to 0. It got reset and they have to start over again with VALID ibl's. Aparently Google went after the affiliate sites and excluded them from the IBL's that count. The site did NOT get banned though. Keep in mind that EVERY templatemonster affiliate site , when a link is clicked on you can see the status bar in explorer pulling info from the main website so it is 100% database driven from the motherland.

[wednesday]

Originally Posted by collusion

It is 100% but it is not banned. Nor is the main site. The only thing that happened is their PR dropped from 8 to 0.

site:templatemonster.com
template monster
link:http://www.templatemonster.com

It's banned.

[collusion]

It seems to have been since 2 days ago. It was not before though. And that is the conclusion of this thread LOL

[garbageaccount]

The same thing happend here just before I got here they started to change the domain for the main site and then added a new skin-site with all the same product etc. but a little different look and feel. Well the PR for the original site sank to 0 and the new site took a long time to get indexed. Over 4 months!

I spent 2 months trying to get the new site to look as 'different' as possible from the original, doing 301 redirects, etc. Finally the original site is back up to 6 and the new site has a 2...But it was a long haul.