[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Handling User-Generated &
Manufacturer-Required Duplicate Content Across Large Numbers of URLs'

Posted by randfish
We know that Google tends to penalize duplicate content, especially when it's
something that's found in exactly the same form on thousands of URLs across the
web. So how, then, do we deal with things like product descriptions, when the
manufacturers require us to display things in exactly the same way as other
companies?


In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers three ways for marketers to include
that content while minimizing the risk of a penalty.







Manufacturer-Required Duplicate Content Across Large Numbers of URLs -
Whiteboard Friday












For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription


Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to be chatting a little bit about a very specific particular problem
that a lot of e-commerce shops, travel kinds of websites, places that host
user-generated and user-review types of content experience with regards to
duplicate content.


So what happens, basically, is you get a page like this. I'm at BMO's Travel
Gadgets. It's a great website where I can pick up all sorts of travel supplies
and gear. The BMO camera 9000 is an interesting one because the camera's
manufacturer requires that all websites which display the camera contain a lot
of the same information. They want the manufacturer's description. They have
specific photographs that they'd like you to use of the product. They might even
have user reviews that come with those.


Because of this, a lot of the folks, a lot of the e-commerce sites who post
this content find that they're getting trapped in duplicate content filters.
Google is not identifying their content as being particularly unique. So they're
sort of getting relegated to the back of the index, not ranking particularly
well. They may even experience problems like Google Panda, which identifies a
lot of this content and says, "Gosh, we've seen this all over the web and
thousands of their pages, because they have thousands of products, are all
exactly the same as thousands of other websites' other products."


So the challenge becomes: How do they stay unique? How do they stand out from
this crowd, and how can they deal with these duplicate content issues?


Of course, this doesn't just apply to a travel gadget shop. It applies broadly
to the e-commerce category, but also to categories where content licensing
happens a lot. So you could imagine that user reviews of, for example, things
like rental properties or hotels or car rentals or flights or all sorts of
things related to many, many different kinds of verticals could have this same
type of issue.


But there are some ways around it. It's not a huge list of options, but there
are some. Number one, you can essentially say, "Hey, I'm going to create so much
unique content, all of this stuff that I've marked here in green. I'm going to
do some test results with the camera, different photographs. I'm going to do a
comparison between this one and other ones. I'm going to do some specs that
maybe aren't included by the manufacturer. I'll have my own BMO's editorial
review and maybe some reviews that come from BMO customers in particular." That
could work great in order to differentiate that page.


Some of the time you don't need that much unique content in order to be
considered valuable and unique enough to get out of a Panda problem or a
duplicate content issue. However, do be careful not to go way overboard with
this. I've seen a lot of SEOs do this where they essentially say, "Okay, you
know what? We're just going to hire some relatively low quality, cheap writers."
Maybe English isn't even their first language or the country of whatever country
you're trying to target, that language is not their first language, and they
write a lot of content that just all sits below the fold here. It's really
junky. It's not useful to anyone. The only reason they're doing it is to try and
get around a duplicate content filter. I definitely don't recommend this. Panda
is built even more to handle that type of problem than this one, from Google's
perspective anyway.


Number two, if you have some unique content, but you have a significant
amount of content that you know is duplicate and you feel is still useful to the
user, you want to put it on that page, you can use iframes to keep it kind of
out of the engine's index, or at least not associated with this particular URL.
If I've got this page here and I say, "Gosh, you know, I do want to put these
user reviews, but they're the same as a bunch of other places on the web, or
maybe they're duplicates of stuff that happened on other pages of my site." I'm
going to take this, and I'm going to build a little iframe, put it around here,
embed the iframe on the page, but that doesn't mean that this content is
perceived to be a part of this URL. It's coming from it's own separate URL,
maybe over here, and that can also work.


Number three, you can take content which is largely duplicative and apply
aggregation, visualization, or modifications to that duplicate content in order
to build something unique and valuable and new that can rank well. My favorite
example of this is what a lot of movie review sites, or review sites of all
kinds, like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes do, where they're essentially
aggregating up review data, and all of the snippets, all of the quotes are
coming from all of these different places on the web. So it's essentially a
bunch of different duplicates, but because they're the aggregator of all of
these unique, useful pieces of content and because they provide their own things
like a metascore or a Rotten Tomatoes rating, or an editorial review of their
own, it becomes something more. The combination of these duplicative pieces of
content becomes more than the sum of its parts, and Google recognizes that and
wants to keep it in their index.


These are all options. Then the last recommendation that I have is when
you're going through this process, especially if you have a large amount of
content that you're already launching with, start with those pages that matter
the most. So you could go down a list of the most popular items in your
database, the things that you know people are searching for the most, the things
that you know you have sold the most of or the internal searches have led to
those pages the most; great, start with those pages. Try and take care of them
from a uniqueness and value standpoint, and you can even, if you want,
especially if you're launching with a large amount of new content all at once,
you can take these duplicative pages and keep them out of the index until you've
gone through that modification process. Now you sort of go, "All right, this
week we got these 10 pages done. Boom, let's make them indexable. Then next week
we're going to do 20, and then the week after that we'll get faster. We'll do
50, 100, and soon we'll have our entire 10,000 product page catalog finish and
completed, all with unique, useful, valuable information that will get us into
Google's index and stop us from being considered duplicate content."


All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next week. Take care.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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