I have heard conflicting views on this matter. I think it may have been Matt Cutts who has said using the same template code on different sites (such as free wordpress themes) and what not can get you into trouble because the search engines see very similar source code. Just last week I was watching a video on webpronews.com where Rand Fishkin interviews the Google Sitemaps manager, and she basically went onto say Google only looks at the text on the page and disregards all the other code. Your thoughts?
Even if Google is only looking at the text on the page, if you use the same template there is a chance of more duplication being detected. Having the same background image isn't going to cause a problem, but you can probably imagine that the navigation and footer areas might be similar. But in practical terms, I don't think you need to worry about the duplication penalty too much unless you plan on duplicating large chunks of content across pages/sites...
Thanks for responding. Funny you mention "duplication penalty". The video went onto discuss this as well. I think it was established that it's more of a "filter" then "penalty".
I don't think having the same template codes will get us into trouble.. as more and more webmasters are using phpbb, drupal etc, search engines must be able to differentiate two phpbb forums with different content. As long as the content is unique, duplication will not happen
i disagree - G definetely has the ability to tell the difference between layout and content elements, so whats not to say that it tkes this any further and recognises similar templates and penalises accordingly? Then we look at the sites that generally rank higher in search engines - they are usually from a bespoke design (although we can argue that sites with a bespoke design generally have a higher budget). My personal interpretation of the Google Algorithm is that it has been created in a way that rewards effort - templates dont really require as much effort as unique designs.
Why would Google penalize use of the same template system? I think that if you are building a legitimate site you shouldn't worry about this at all. If you are hosting the same template on 200 sites on the same IP address and each site is scraping content and has no really good backlinks, then maybe Google will punish you. If you just have one site or a couple of sites using the same template, you will not be penalized.
I strongly disagree with it suppose if you are searching for mobile phone forums in google A couple sites using Vbulletin and the same skin will come up and the one which is first would be because of back links (PR) and not any other thing liek design
Google bots easily recognise between content, templates, guest books and other data on the website. Don't worry about these little things. Add unique content regularly and wait for 2-3 weks for the results.