I've come across these 2 forums: http://www.webdesigntalk.net/ http://www.namepros.com/ They are both using the same data to build the 2 sites. I believe that when one user post on one forum the data will be shared with another forum .. u can see that the post count, thread number and everything else is the same. I believe that the sites are running co-op as i see links pointing back to DP. My question is that: is this against the rules? one is pr 6 and one is pr5. althought the site:command doesnt show many pages indexed. Does google consider this spam or what? im just about to report it .. looking for your feedback .. maybe im wrong and it's nothing wrong that the forum owner is doing this ?
not sure what you're talking about with the site command. one shows almost 400, the other shows over 6000 pages indexed. as far as it being spam, i'm not sure. webdesigntalk does look like an exact copy of namepros, but they also have less then a tenth of indexed pages, perhaps because of dup content.
Have you checked with the API? (Anyone know the syntax for that... I get no results for any site: query using the API).
I just checked via the DP tool for pages indexed and the numbers are very different from the site command. (i had not checked via the API prior, sorry) webdesign: 25,400 namepros: 1,080
Even if they were using the same data, it wouldn't matter. Visitors see these as two different sites and if Google has indexed them, they see them as two different sites. Coop members are still getting their moneys worth as visitors AND Google see the ads displayed. This is being treated as a redirect trick which it is not. If this was to be disallowed you would have to kick out any site that uses DMOZ data
The duplicate content filter already takes care of most of it - 25K vs 1K. They don't benefit beyond what they deserve so I guess this is sort of fine.