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Your root domain may have been penalized, but you could probably get a better idea if you could look at the traffic or keywords that your domain ranked for before the update. I know this sounds stupid, but make sure your results aren't being personalized. Googles really been skewing all of my results with that lately, and doesn't let me disable it.

I use Google webmaster tools. Go to diagnostics, then crawl errors.

Are you searching site:domain.com with no www? I'd say that's not good if it's other competitiors, and not other pages of your site. Which one does your domain redirect to, and did it do this before the update?

I'd attempt to contact Google. I know it's really hard, but there are ways. Good luck man I feel for ya.

I don't believe it's a penalty, but seems a lot of people have this same question. Google:  "There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

If I remember correct Rand Fishkin says in this webinar that it's gonna hurt, but you may want to watch it to be 100%! I remember it being sometime after 40-50% of the webinar I think. http://www.seomoz.org/dp/pro-webinar-october-2010-with-rand-fishkin

Good luck!

I see you just joined this monday. Since the on-page ranking report updates every Sunday, it looks like you just missed it! Not all is lost! You can look forward to your keyword rankings updating this Friday. Best of luck.

The only thing I can suggest would be Ajax, but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will have a better answer for you. In any case, good luck.

Technically it's not duplicate content. If he gets traffic to particular keywords phrases from the test content then canonicalization would hurt his traffic. The traffic from the keywords might not be targeted to test takers, but if that's your only form of traffic then rel canonical would hurt; BAD. Please, correct me if I'm wrong though.

From google:

Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?

Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

You should probably research for yourself before you take anyone's advice: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Personally though, I'd look into ajax. There are many freely available resources that you can use. Hope that helps.

Thanks I had no clue about this. Better check my feed more eh? That guy definitely thumbed down you lol

It's definitely something to do with a wide range of IP's/accounts/locations searching for the same thing that influences it. I'm working for a site now that has really no SEO, but they're widely known offline for their customized products. People get to the site almost exclusively typing some version of "brand name" or "brand name product." While they won't rank at all for "certain product," when you type in "brand name" it will auto complete with the products they're known for offline, as well as marketing campaigns they've done.

Edit: As well as one autosuggest being a brick and mortar location (the city) that they no longer operate out of. Which was another search term people would add to the the end of "brand name"

Hope that provides some more insight.

You could change the title/description for each page reflecting the content, but that would take forever and probably doesn't fluctuate much page to page (on that specific test.) Optionally you could try using meta robots, but you may not rank when people search specific code snippets (or other test questions.)

name="robots" content="FOLLOW,NOINDEX" />

You might try out using ajax for the pages as in googles eyes it would only be considered one page. Hope it's helped.