Is it possible to be penalized as duplicate content for one keyword but not another?

[moondog604]

I help develop an online shopping cart and after a request from management about some products not showing up in the SERP's I was able to pinpoint it down to mostly a duplicate content issue. It's a no brainer as some times new products are inserted in with copied text from the manufacturers website.

I recently though stumbled across a odd problem. When we partially re-wrote the content to seem unique enough it seemed to remedy the issue for some keywords and not others.

A) If you search the company name our category listing shows as #1 ahead of the manufacturers website. We always did rank for this term.

B) If you search the product name our product page is listed #3 behind two other listings which belong to the manufacturer.

C) If you search the keywords together as "company product" we are still being filtered out as duplicate content. When I allow the filtered results to show we are ranking #4

It's been a full month since the changes were indexed.

Before I rewrite the content even further I thought I would ask to see if any one has any insight as to what could be happening.

[Syed1]

I believe its a keyword/phrase based filter. Meaning, the site probably got too many exact anchor links and/or used too much of the same keyword or phrase in the title, description & main body.

Also, like you mentioned, it could be a duplicate content issue - try looking at the re-written content: where you use the keyword/phrase that you are targeting. Perhaps, it wasn't rewritten effectively to be pass Copyscape/ considered 'original'?

[moondog604]

I think I'll try eliminating a few direct match phrases on the page. Have a few more references to the company on it's own and the product on it's own.

If that fails I'll re-write the content further. If it ends up being a duplicate content issue I'll be amazed, I just can't see passing for some keywords and failing for others because of duplicate content.