The long road to SEO success - Unique Content

[jaffstar]

Lately I have seen many sites with duplicate content get hammered by duplicate content penalties in Google.

The first sign is massive amounts of pages excluded from the index. Their core pages such as their hubs all have unique content and do well.

It seems that the road to success is to go 100%/mostly unique. The issue with this is very few companies have the budget to write 1000's of unique pages.

I have a site with 1000's of unique pages and yes it does well in the SERPS. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this dilemma of going 100% unique or taking the risk and getting hurt.

[HuskyPup]

It seems that the road to success is to go 100%/mostly unique.

In my experience that's nothing new and should always have been so.

The issue with this is very few companies have the budget to write 1000's of unique pages.

That's a strange statement. Why would any bona fide company want thousands of rehashed pages? If they cannot provide any unique relevance or user value why should their sites be used by anyone? There's enough garbage floating around as it is.

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this dilemma of going 100% unique

No dilemma for me except possibly where one or two product lines may cross depending from which country source I supply and even Google doesn't seem to have a problem with that which can easily be seen in the Google.ccTLD results as being totally relevant.

Go G...get rid of the garbage:-)

[jaffstar]

Why would any bona fide company want thousands of rehashed pages?

There are many people selling products online. They have to rehash these pages for rankings to make sales. Yes they are essentially re-doing something that exists to get rankings.

nothing new and should always have been so.

I do agree, yet the counter argument is many sites have not done this yet rank.

[HuskyPup]

There are many people selling products online.

Ahhh...you're referring specifically to ecommerce sites?

Yeah, that must be a problem for them and especially so when they're all given the same technical data etc with which to work.

I wonder proportionately how many new sales they get as opposed to repeat customers? Whenever I need anything, and that usually means something electrical/tv/computers, I go to half a dozen sites where I know I will get a good specification deal, it would take something extraordinary to entice me away from one of these suppliers and unless I couldn't find specifically what I was searching for it's very unlikely I would even bother using the SERPs!

Thanks heavens I don't have to compete like that in such a crazy market!

[mhansen]

IMHO - If you are competing in an ecommerce space with hundreds of people selling the same products, you would be foolish to spend your time on rewriting thousands of product descriptions...

Instead, spend your time and money on either advertising (PPC, Industry ragazines, etc) or finding creative ways to stitch those products into useful content (Buying guides, etc)

There are only SO MANY ways to describe a pair of "Pretty Red Shoes"... but creating a guide of the "Top 5 Pretty Red Shoes for People with High Arches", and linking to your shoes... that will get you noticed over time! :-)

OMG - Did I just spew Matt Cutts! :-) It works though... gotta differentiate yourself from the thousands of others in some way.

[tedster]

Also remember that SEO for Google is mostly a kind of acquisition marketing - and give some energy to "retention marketing" so that you DO create customer loyalty. Once your retained customer base reaches a certain size, you begin to establish "brand" status and that also helps with SEO.

[Fern]

Worrying about 100% unique content is a joke and a waste of time.

If I posted an article on a brand new site, then 10 days later, LA Times copied my article word for word, posted it on their site, and got links from bloggers to their page, who do you think is going to rank? Them or My new site?

So vice versa, if you have a weak site that decides to throw dupe content up from LA Times, have no links to the page, who do you think will rank?

I tried making that an extreme example to hopefully get my point across easily.

[jaffstar]

Ahhh...you're referring specifically to ecommerce sites?

Yes.. Where the goal is targeting specific people searching for products that sell. With 100k + searches a month it can provide valuable revenue, hence people are looking at getting SEO traffic to generate revenue.

Thanks heavens I don't have to compete like that in such a crazy market!

Lucky for you, reality for many webmasters.

There are only SO MANY ways to describe a pair of "Pretty Red Shoes"... but creating a guide of the "Top 5 Pretty Red Shoes for People with High Arches", and linking to your shoes... that will get you noticed over time! :-)

This is the way forward IMHO. Writing content that can attract rankings, traffic , links = better than re-writing 1000's of products.

Question: If you run a site for 1000's of pages and you all your product details pages are copied, does Google devalue only the copied content OR the site ?

[ErnestHemingway]

jeff, you have to provide something of Value. Unless of course you are Mahalo or some other big player that nobody would touch. For us we have to play the game fair.