Quote:
Originally Posted by d-null
maybe google thinks that it is a duplicate content issue?
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They are all wordpress blogs and I didn't noindex anything so that could be but I think it is not for two reasons:
1. it is only happening to 10% of my wordpress blogs and most of them are very very similar.
2. the homepage was the highest in the serps for the targeted keyword at some time in the past on all them except 2. It is probably true of those 2 as well I just can't say for sure.
If the homepage and a category page are determined to have the same content the duplicate content penalty would likely lower the category page, right? I have seen the duplicate content penalty behave in a few different ways but it seems to me that if the offending duplicate is all on one domain Google determines it is an innocent mistake, penalizes all of the content except 1, and gives that 1 a chance to compete with no penalty at all. It seems like if that were the case the 1 would be the homepage when it was indexed first, already ranked higher in the serps, and has the inbound links coming directly at it. Also, there are multiple interior pages in the results for many of these domains. That would also seem to rule out the theory of 1.