One of company's website is a standard information hub. Clients purchase not necessarily ads but custom descriptions with a title and a picture (about 300 characters of text).
Here's the problem...these paragraphs these clients are sending us to put online are not unique. Frequently they will send these (roughly) 3 sentence descriptions to our competitors who do the same thing we do. Furthermore we reuse this client text to paste in multiple locations that we control:
One or more category pages
The business 'detail page' (same text goes here)
And our sister site which has regional coverage of these types of businesses also uses this same text
My primary concern is our competitors. On average, I google these phrases and 98% of them are copied onto other domains. Maybe about 40% of these other domains actually come up higher than our site...which makes me fear that they are getting credit for this valuable unique content and google is punishing us for duplicate content. If it is is pretty much the same text, only one site (minus google bugs) is getting credit, right? This has me worried as the ones ranking better than us (it varies) are not standard scraper sites (those appear a lot too but they almost always rank at the bottom) but our competitors in the same industry.
My question is...how much trouble is this getting us into? Do I really need to worry about this as it isn't our fault our clients gave us the exact same information they are giving everybody else. Should I be consolidating my category/detail pages and possibly my regional pages? Hate to ax pages, but if I'm competing with myself for unique content...
