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shakes44
Joined: Jan 21, 2007
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2007-Aug-31 19:57
Hi,
I am new here and fairly new to the world of e-commerce and SEO. I am looking for some guidance on what exactly is considered duplicate content. I have some products that are drop shipped and the company I deal with supplies all the images, descriptions, etc. I originally used their descriptions for me site before I starting getting more into SEO and realized I was making a mistake by doing this. I partially rewrote their descriptions but was wondering if this was enough. If I use one of their sentences as part of the description would this be duplicate content or does it have to be exactly the same.
Also, I purchased content articles to add some useful information to my site. Since these articles are possibly on other sites would it be wise for me to not have them crawled by the search engines?
Thanks,
Maria
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marketraisecorp
Joined: Jun 14, 2007
# Posts: 20
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Posted: 2007-Sep-04 13:43
They are termed as PLR websites.The basic funda of plr site is to post borrowed articles on the website without giving anyone credit and also withhelding the identity of the original poster.In short, its spam unless you are willing to modify them somewhat, you aren't really doing yourself alot of favor by using them on your site. Google is definitely frowning upon those who are using duplicate content.Logically speaking, altering rights should grant the buyer master resale rights as well. But most of the PLR content offers have restrictions to the effect that you can't resell the same without substantial alteration of the products. By "substantial alteration," the seller usually pegs a change of more than 20%.They also state you can not resell or give them away.Now there are sites out there and people are selling the same plr content at cheap prices!It will get to a point that only newbies and fools will purchase such stuff.The only real plr is going to be your own.Someone is selling a software program that he states will take any article and rewrite it differently, no matter how many people submit the same article to the software.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3603
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Posted: 2007-Sep-04 15:20
Hi Maria - welcome to SEF!
Here are some useful links to help you find your way around here at SEF:
The Search Function - this will help you find loads of useful things - just type in some keywords on the topic, select a date range (default is "for the last 2 weeks" and go. You can also search by author if you like.
The Main Index - this will show you the list of all the main sections here at SEF and get you quickly pointed to the space you're after.
Active Topics - this button can be found in the top navigation bar (as can all others) and is a list of today's active topics - very handy to see what's going on right now.
My Topics - this will show you a list of all the topics you've participated in - handy for finding that thread you posted in yesterday, quickly.
Our Forum Rules - worth reading through so you know the lay of the land here. We don't allow signatures or links in sigs. Link dropping is also frowned upon - we clean them up quickly, but best to read the rules first.
Finally, if you want to include a sample URL to illustrate a point, like www.domain.com/folder/file.html, be sure to wrap the URL in those little italics tags {i} - {/i} and it'll show up (replace the {} with []). Otherwise, our system will try to make the link real on you. As a reminder, this is NOT an invitation to include a link to your site - it's strictly used to explain things like URL structures.
_________________________________________________
Now, to answer your questions directly, here we go...
No one knows exactly what percentage of things must change to be seen as NOT duplicate content. The engines do not share that data - they don't tell anyone that if it's more than 60% the same, for example, they consider it duplicate.
So, a safe rule of thumb is for YOU to assume if it appears elsewhere on the Internet, and it was up before you, YOU will be seen as duplicate.
What should you do?
Well, get cracking at rewriting all the descriptions yourself. A sentence here or there won't really matter, but if every item description uses an identical sentence to what's used somewhere else, it's a tip to the engines that it may be dupe content - they watch for patterns like that.
Don't forget to properly label any images with good alt attribute tags. Make sure to use the proper keyword/phrase to describe the image/item, and don't go overboard. Image search is taking on more prominence now that Google is using it's Universal Search results (showing more images at the top of the page on certain searches).
As for the content articles - stop buying them - write your own. Make each one unique, about 200 words or so as a minimum length (no real end on this) and get the keyword inserted near the beginning of the article as many times as it makes sense to. You'll be doing good if, in the first 50 words or so you can mention it twice. The key is to read the article when you're done. if it sounds odd, even in the slightest, start removing the keyword until it reads easy - if that means it only gets mentioned once near the top of the article, so be it - better it reads properly for human users.
After all that, just another quick thanks for coming to hang with us. SEF is one of the oldest search engine optimization help forums online.
Enjoy. 
PS - the advice I give is general guidelines. Different things work for different situations, but that's the basics of what I do. I DO NOT sweat what is known as "keyword density" (how many times the word appears in relation to all the other words on the page). I do make sure anything I write is easily readable by human users - make them happy and they'll link to you.
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shakes44
Joined: Jan 21, 2007
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2007-Sep-05 02:33
Thanks for the great advice! I did rewrite all my descriptions so hopefully that will help me move up in the ranks.
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beth_lk
Staff
Joined: Jun 23, 2004
# Posts: 1308
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Posted: 2007-Sep-05 05:38
Hi Marie - I strongly suggest you ask for a site review in the correct forum here. I think it will do you/your site a lot of good if someone reviews it for you
Beth
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shakes44
Joined: Jan 21, 2007
# Posts: 15
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Posted: 2007-Sep-05 19:43
Thanks Beth. I didn't realize I could do that. I posted a thread today to review my site.
Maria
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usaweb
Joined: Aug 14, 2007
# Posts: 12
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Posted: 2007-Sep-07 11:43
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
Most of the time when we see this, it's unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and -- worse yet -- linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on.
In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.
Multiple URL’s with same content…identical homepages w/same content. Why is it a problem? Because “they” say so.
Recommends looking at the webmaster guidelines at G, Open Directory, and Yahoo. The real reason that this is a problem uis that you wind up confusing the SE robots.
[ Message was edited by: JimBot 09/07/2007 12:05 pm ... Reason: Removed Link as per TOS. ]
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