Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It takes a lot of time to write a truly balanced article about legislation being debated at the national or even state level.
I got lazy, and just grabbed press releases from various special interest groups.
This was about the time that Google was going through one of their infamous updates, and I lost ranking for certain terms. So, I removed any press releases, and only kept the articles I'd written myself.
But I see these press releases everywhere.
With my rankings being about as good as anyone could hope for, I'm loathe to mess with success. But I definitely don't like the political news section of the site to be months out of date.
So, is reprinting widely-distributed press releases "duplicate content," or just the norm?
Any replies much appreciated.
So, is reprinting widely-distributed press releases "duplicate content," or just the norm?
Both :)
Press releases are made to be distributed, so if they are done right, you will see them all over.
But from a search engine perspective, they are duplicate content, and of little (if any) long term benefit to the publisher. But a press release is not about long term benfit, but 'news' - and if you go to Google news, you'll find endless repetition. but by the time thye start appearing in standard google searches, many, many of them will have been filtered out into supplementary listings, or dropped entirely.
There is absolutely no substitute for unique content; and as you don't want stale copy, best to leave them to the news sites. As a general rule, no syndicated article / article farm article / etc., will give the publisher any significant benfit at all, though you may be giving the source free promotion.
The exceptions are those few article banks that have a quality bar, and so actually get readers, not just spiders, using them.
This also holds true for RSS newsfeeds. If you use a feed, make sure there is a lot of original content on the feed page, a page that is 75% duplicate or more is pretty much a useless page IMO.
About 1000 of the 1600 pages on my site are devoted to particular models of widgets from major manufacturers. I get permission from the manufacturers, and then copy their product descriptions.
My site ranks in the top five for practically every brand and model, and has done so since I built the site in 2004. So, there must be enough of a difference that Google doesn't regard the content as duplicate.
I'm not looking to gain any benefit in the search engines by adding these; the idea is simply to offer visitors news they might not otherwise see.
But I don't want to mess with my success by getting banned by Google. Maybe what happened over a year ago was just one of Google's random glitches.
So, my choices are either to take the risk and add the news releases, or drop the political section entirely.
Press releases that link to your site can add a great amount of value.
Press releases from other sources on your site usually add a small amount of value.
In terms of conversions . . .?
But what I do is create short synopsis of the news in my own words with a link to the BBC site for full coverage...
It seems to work well, a little more work but only just and avoids a dupicate content issue...
But as stated above, provided the press release is not the ONLY content on th page (you say you have discussion, etc.,), then you really have little to worry about, and it sounds like you are providing a useful service.
However, if you are concerened, do monitor your site stats, and occasionally search for 'unique content from your pages" to see what is happening.
But it sounds to me that you have unique pages which include some duplicated content. As Google (etc.,) look at ALL the page code, not just the text, you are likely to be OK.
