How to make double-content from manufacturer unique?

[cangoou]

Hello!

I have the opportunity to get content for my website from a manufactur of a product I'm selling. The texts are a real benefit to my website and my users, making them stay longer and come back. Of course the manufactur itself has these texts on his website. But he is not selling his produtcs himself (available only from dealers), so he doesn't do any SEO or SEM and people would find my site long before his site if they are coming from a search-engine.

My problem now is: What should I do to avoid double-content? Should I set the pages to NOINDEX or forbid the directory in robots.txt? Or should I try to make the textes unique somehow?

I would prefer makeing the textes unique, because I think I will be found with a lot of more keywords (long tail) when I allow to spider the sites. And my content will grow about 1/3, which is good as well.

So my question is: From which point a text is considered as "unique"? Would adding a paragraph do the trick? Or do I have to rewrite all of the texts?

[Bones]

Personally I would rewrite the whole thing into a similar style of the existing website and try to add value if possible.

Eg: Pop in some customer testimonials/quotes. Add some of your own pictures. Include your own review/sales pitch etc.

I don't think just changing the odd word or sentence here and there would do the trick.

[edit]bad grammar![/edit]

[edited by: Bones at 7:51 pm (utc) on July 16, 2007]

[cangoou]

Thanks for your reply. I think, the problem rewriting the text is simply the count of pages - I forgott to tell you that we are talking about text on ca. 2000 pages. So if I find a "non-manuall" way to make the text unique it will safe me a lot of time and money.

[WeaselyOne]

I know people who have done it successfully but generally speaking I don't think a "non-manual" way is going to work unless you count allowing visitors to add their own reviews, etc... Search engines have gotten very good at finding dupe content and even if they didn't figure it out now they probably would eventually.

Hire a college student for $10 an hour to do the writing or just pick 50-100 of the content pages (the ones that you stand to gain the most from) and re-write them. If it turns out to be worthwhile you can continue the process with another batch of 50-100.

[Bones]

Woah, 2000 duplicate pages eh! Yes that would be a problem. I don't think you'll find an easy, long term solution to that overnight.

There's a few solutions, but I think I'd write a bunch of my own totally original pages then and simply link to the manufacturers content where appropriate as an authoritative source.

[londrum]

maybe you could just include one paragraph on the actual page, and then do a 'click here to read more' or something like that... which will open up the full review.

and then just block all the pages with full reviews in robots.txt

[cangoou]

Thanks for your replys.

Thats a good idea, but gives another question: How much of the original text can I use before it's considered as doublicated?!