I speak to many people in both the real estate world and other areas where templated web sites are used and they ask us the question should I use a templated web site ?
This is a difficult question to answer so knowing I'm about to get a lot of comments objecting to my response here goes.
Templated web sites all come out looking pretty much the same even if you wrap them with a different graphic, footer, colors etc. The main problem is, everybody using a templated site is likely using the same names for their pages, with virtually the same content, all hosted on the same IP address. This then brings up the duplicate content question, and experience tells me, that if the search engines, especially Google see duplicate content, on pages with the same name, on the same IP address you are going to receive a penalty of some sort. I'm not saying your page or site will be banned, but I would expect to see it in the supplemental index, then what this means is that Google will only report that page if it doesn't have a page in it's main index that matches. Before all of you templated guys start screaming at me, I know many of you allow custom pages, but on the whole many of the pages are the same.
So my advice is find a nice web site template layout that you like and then build up from there. The clever guys today are using a template like this, then using a content management type system to generate unique pages, with unique content. This does mean a little more work up front, and I'm sure in many cases a little more cost, but in the long un you will end up with an Internet Marketing friendly web site, with unique content that will be appealing to your visitors.
Remember internet marketing is about having a site that is appealing to your visitors when they arrive on your site, being friendly to the search engines so you rank well and driving traffic there using all of the internet marketing tools available.
I'm in no way saying that a templated site will not rank or that it cannot be ranked, what I'm saying is more pages will likely be indexed and it will be more appealing to your visitors if they see something that is telling them what they want to know that they haven't already seen on 10 other sites before.
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