Original Content

Pages with unique and non unique content

[gosman]

I am an affiliate for a travel company. I have created a page for each of the most popular destinations, about 60 in total. These pages contain unique text about each destination. I also feature a recommended hotel on each of these pages. The text for the featured hotel is not unique, it has been provided by the company I am affiliated with and also appears on their website. My question is will these pages be filtered out by Google because of duplicate content

[dnbjason]

If the whole page is exactly the same, then it is duplicate content. If only a PART of the page is the same content then I wouldn't worry.

[djgreg]

Even if Google wanted to penalize for parts of the same content it would be simple impossible from the technical point of view. Also this would cause high confusion, imagine all websites featuring news from a Reuters or DPA or any press agency would get PR0 because of non unique content.

[Travel]

It sounds like you are in a good spot with that. One trick we have used to figure this out is to take a chunk of the text- a good sized chunck- and search for it in Google- where do you end up in the results? If it's near the top- you've done well. If it's near the bottom, my guess is Google isn't going to like you too well for other terms either- work with it until you have a bit more unique.

We use this because we noticed when doing this the top sites often had the most differentiation and were often top performers sales wise.

[drewlewis]

If it were necessary to use duplicated material; Product descriptions, Usage guidelines excreta, would it make sense to use the noindex nofollow tag in order not penalize the pages linking to the duplicated content pages

[Jenstar]

I have seen a single paragraph (3-5 sentences long) which the duplicate content filter did filter out. A copyright infringer took one paragraph from a longer page and put it on his own page, and that was enough to trip the filter. He did this throughout his site, so it is possible it is something applied on a page level, and also on a domain level as well.

It is hard to know why this wouldn't catch more of the affiliate sites out, unless it is perhaps done as a percentage of original vs duplicate content on a new page. This persons page had NO original content, just the stolen content.

[gosman]

I am now very confused! I have now changed the pages to all unique content. I have been checking Google everyday to see if they have been indexed. When I checked this morning the cache Google has for my index page has changed to an old one and my pages are still not listed. Help!

[Hawkgirl]

It can take time for your changes to be reflected in Google. :) If you've made changes so that you now have unique content on every page, you've done the right thing. Now you'll just need to sit back and be patient while Google does it's thing. (This is the hard part.)

[gosman]

Hawkgirl you were right. Done an allinurl this morning and selected show omitted results, and hey prestoall 60 odd pages had been indexed. I was so happy I had to show a friend. But when I done an allinurl again this afternoon, they have all gone. I even tried taking a chunk of unique text from one of the pages. No results shown. I am now even more confused.

[Hawkgirl]

Hang in there. Google results fluctuate - that's just a part of their processes. So hang in there and ride it out. Again, if you made the changes to all unique content, ultimately you've done the right thing! :)