Need Clarification on Duplicate Content

Google's thought on this

[JoeHouse]

Question 1

I need some clarification as to what and how Google's defines dup content.

I have a website that sells widgets. I use the manufacturers product descriptions for these items that I sell simply for the fact that I have thousands of items and it would be too time consuming to add these manually.

My question is does Google see this as duplicate content? Do I get penalized for doing this? Does my rankings suffer because of it?

Will I get better ranking if I change all the descriptions to unique content?

Question 2

I also have a blog that I use on this website. Some of the articles I write on my own and some articles I use with permission from the writer to post on my blog.

My question is this. Even though the content is topically related on my blog but not all is unique, does Google see the articles I post from other writers as dup content?

These articles I use come from popular article websites and I use them (with permission) as related content to what I sell. Does this hurt my ranking as well?

I am looking for some sound advice that will help me move way up in the rankings.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

[tedster]

The first thing I want to say is that when Google detects this kind of duplicate content, it considers it job to be filtering out identical results from the SERPs. That's not exactly a penalty aginst the site. s users, if they didn't filiter like these, we would all be very unhappy withe their search results.

Question One:
You are describing what Googlers call a "thin website". It can be very hard to get those URLs to rank, and the more competitors you have who duplicate the manufacter's supplied descriptions, the harder it is to get your pages to show in the SERP. At a certain point, many of URLs may even be tagged as Suplemental and be spidered quite infrequently. In short, if you want Google to rank your URLs then you need to offer something extra to your visitors.

Question Two:
In your thinking here, remember that Google indexes and ranks a URL, and not a "site". If the content on one of your URLs can be found on many other domains, then I think your URL will be quite difficult to rank. But if another URL on your site contains your own unique content, I think it would stand a much better chance of ranking.

Unless a large percentage of your pages are just duplicates of other URLs on the web, then I don't think there is likely to be a spill-over effect to your entire domain.

[JoeHouse]

Great stuff tedster

However do we have any experience with site not ranking well because of item product dup content?

I have heard a work around to this is to have tons of inbound links with your keyword in it as anchor. Is this true?

[g1smd]

There are several types of duplicate content:

- exact duplicates (including www and non-www, multiple domains, different parameters, different parameter order, http and https, etc)
- pseudo duplicates (same title tag and/or same meta description on multiple pages, even if the rest of the on-page content is different)
- syndication duplicates (where multiple sites run the same content produced by a single source, but with different navigation code, different HTML coding, and different site structure).

They all get filtered in some way.

[helpnow]

So for the syndication duplicates, how much different does the content have to be before the page is NOT considered a duplicate?

1. How much editing would be enough to push it over the line between duplicate content -> not quite duplicate content?

- if I add an introductory paragraph, does the page still get labelled a dupe?
- if I annotate in some remarks from the editor throughout the article, is it still dupe?
- what if I just correct grammar and spelling mistakes?

2. If the text is hyperlinked back into your site, does that change the dup content label? For example, if I take a chunk of text from a manufacturer, and just drop it into my site: duplicate content. But what if I put a bunch of hyperlinks into that content into my site, now what? Let's say the manufacturer text says "we are experts in x, y and z", and I have hyperlinked x, y and z to the pages on my site where you can find those x, y and z products. I've modified the text slightly in that I have at least added some truly useful hyperlinks. Duplicate content?

[Whitey]

I think Google will quickly understand the link between your text descriptions and the other site's original content.

Just playing with the re arrangement of text and adding a few links may provide some temporary advantage, but Google is onto tidying up this type of thing.

Better that you turn your thinking and focus on how you can provide useful information of that data in a re arranged and compelling way, that makes you distinct from other sites. Done well, the arrangement could be unique. Done badly Google will likely filter it.

Adam Lasnik recenly made mention of this on the post about "Thin Affiliates" [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 6:35 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] fix the link [/edit]

[contentwithcontent]

Google states in its guidelines the following...

"If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first."