Similar About Us / Disclaimer Pages

Will this get me dropped?

[GrinninGordon]

Hi Everyone

I have two sites that have similar, sometimes identical products (when I say identical, I mean exact same. Wen I say similar, I mean different quantities and prices, but the actual product is the same). I run them for two suppliers. I have built them differently in many respects, but similar in some.

I am concerned as I used the same basic "about us" and "disclaimer" pages for both, as both suppliers said "use the standard text". Is this going to cause me duplicate content problems with Google. The market is a well contested one, and I suspect Google will be applying harsher algos for this subject.

I changed the text a wee bit, but not too much as I did not want to change the legal effect of course. These are products that require legal notices and therefore most sites have pretty similar wording.

Keep Grinnin

[Brett_Tabke]

Duplicates of that nature are no problem. In fact, duplicates in general are no problem. What happens when you have a dupe is that the newer page simply won't rank as well as the old one - it bascially cancels itself out. It will still be listed, but referrals will be few and far between. That's no problem. Especially if you point to the page everwhere with "about" or "disclaimer" in the link text. It's clear Google looks at such words to determine quality of the destination page.

[GrinninGordon]

Thanks Brett :-)

But it irks me that I wrote a disclaimer a long time back that everyone else basically uses now and my site (it got dumped by Google at one stage for cross linking with another site) is at the bottom (probably all all because it got penalized) of the pile! Never mind. It had many days of sunshine and made lots of hay.

[Brett_Tabke]

Putting it at the bottom of the page isn't a garantee that it will be overlooked. That's an algo tweak that changes month-to-month

[GrinninGordon]

Hi Brett

I meant I was bottom of the results, so therefore I lost the crown for writing that disclaimer. Not that the disclaimer was at the bottom of my html ;-)