Duplicate Content from Partner Sites

[JinKazama]

Hi,

I'm working on a travel site and have been told they have an agreement to sell another company's trips. Unfortunately, they are doing this by using product descriptions taken from the partner site.

It is not a duplicate of the whole page, more like 20% of the content that is being copied, but I'm still advising them to re-write it and make it unique.

Re-writing may take them several months, so what would be the best solution to this in the meantime? Add a noindex tag to the affected pages to remove them from the index, add a cross-domain canonical tag, or something else?

Thanks,

[Shai]

With 20% duplication, I would not bother noindxing them to be honest unless there is clear evidence that the site is being affected by Panda currently.

[Planet13]

Please ask the owners of the site how they expect to rank well when they are using copied content - and only 20% of the whole page?

Please ask them why they think google would rank THEIR page above the original page (or even another site that is using 100% of the copied content).

[LifeinAsia]

It is not a duplicate of the whole page, more like 20% of the content that is being copied, but I'm still advising them to re-write it and make it unique.

Basically, it sounds like the tour description is complementary to the content on the rest of the page? Example, a page about travel to Widgetland and 20% of the page is about a tour from the partner site that goes to Widgetland.

I'm still advising them to re-write it and make it unique

Rewriting the content could be a violation of the ToS with the partner.

One option may be to limit the amount of copy from the partner on that page (getting it below 5-10% maybe) with a link to another page with the full description. Noindex that secondary page (and maybe even nofollow the link to that page).

A better version of that option would be to create a unique summary of the trip, then link to the noindexed full description. This would avoid any duplicate content issues, probably still be in compliance with the partner's ToS, and would take less time than rewriting the full tour descriptions.