Hello! So I'm curious. I know that Google will penalize me if I use duplicate content. I am currently using the same 'very basic' site template for about 5 of my sites. All of the content is different. All but some of the links. Some of the links exist on all of the sites but as far as content each site is different. I think I'm more worried about Google penalizing me for duplicate 'code' content. I'm not sure Penguin and Panda work that way though. Thanks in advance for your input! Tek
Using same template should not have an problem as far as the contents of the different sites are quite different.
It shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is different. Think of all the blogs out there with the same theme, I'm sure none of them get penalized.
Its not a problem. Make sure you content is unique for each site. If Google penalize using same template, google blogsspot site will never shows in Google index.
It's not the code that matters, it's what Google sees within the code that matters. Text, titles, meta data, etc.