Duplicate content Issues for the resellers

[subhzash]

Hi All,

My client has signed as a reseller to one of the product selling sites. He wants to build a site to resell the products in other geographical areas where main site is not selling their products.

The client wants to make an exact replica of the site in which he has signed up as reseller. Now my question is does he face duplicate content issues from the search engines? If yes, what are some ways to solve this?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

[louis2609]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.

[subhzash]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.

Thanks for the reply. Main problem is there is huge amount of content if we re-write it will take lot of time.

[subhzash]

I have one idea. Can we use the external website in canonical tag to avoid penalty from Search Engines?

[NickTyler81]

I don't think you can use the canonical tag for the external site as the root domain will be different. Also I'm not sure that you will get a big penalty for the duplicate content as the engine should know yours is the origional as it is alot older and will have been crawled before. The external site may have a problem with dup but that may not be so much your concern.

Maybe try to build the external site as a non-exact duplicate? There must be another way to display the same info but in different structure nav order?

There are alot of product descriptions that are used many times across the web for many places selling the same product and I would hope the engines are intelligent enough to realise that.

[innominds]

Even if it takes time, I would recommend you to get UNIQUE content for the site.
These days it is very difficult to survive in online business despite of being unique.
So, you should not take the things for granted.
Work hard even if it takes time.
I hope your efforts will be paid sooner.

[michaelhartzell]

Agreed about duplicate content and possibly rethinking the optimization vs. copy and paste.

There is no guarantee that a past description is optimized either.

[claybutler]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.
This is not true. Here's how Google handles duplicate content. The algorithm will take all factors into consideration and then present the one it feels is most relevant followed by the others until it runs out of matches. That's it. No penalties and no purging from the SERP's. Generally with an affilate site the owner relies on social networking and PPC to drive traffic because they are offing nothing special that can't be found on a hundred other affiliate sites. So natural high SEPRs position is very difficult. You can overcome the dupe content somewhat by inbound links with great anchor text and customizing all the other elements that are in your control. But if you just want to dupe a site and thing you're going to make money you're dreaming. No going to happen. Affiliate marketing is really hard work.

[C0ldf1re]

... Affiliate marketing is really hard work.

Yes. For those who don't know, no "ready-made affiliate site" is ever going to make it in SERPS.

[DonOmite]

Start out dupe then change things. It doesn't take a lot to make it non-dupe. Do changes to alt-texts and such.

[IslandRealEstate]

How does this work with real estate sites? The property description content and often the property titles that real estate agents post on different marketing sites is almost always the same. Agents today market their properties on their own sites and then across a host of other sites. Is there content considered to be duplicate?

[PhilipDunn]

This is not true. Here's how Google handles duplicate content. The algorithm will take all factors into consideration and then present the one it feels is most relevant followed by the others until it runs out of matches. That's it. No penalties and no purging from the SERP's.

Clay, are you saying this is how Google handles dup content with affiliate sites? or dup content in general..

[cz]

Start out dupe then change things. It doesn't take a lot to make it non-dupe. Do changes to alt-texts and such.

I have two sites selling the exact same products. We transferred everything to the newer site and it took me about a month of doing minor changes in the text and the meta tags. Now it's as hihgly listed as the original. Show some progress as often as you possibly can and include inbound links from your old resources and web real estate (blogs, various pages like squidoo lenses etc.) and subsitute new anchor text.

This worked fine for me 2 years ago - today it might be different. Good luck! :smile:

[Big Juice]

To answer the question to Clay for him, how dupe content is handled in general.

As a super affiliate I can tell you that there is almost no point in using the dupe content if it be SERPS you are looking for. It doesn't matter what the topic is or the type of affiliate be it real estate or erectile dysfunction you need original content to differentiate your site from all of the others.

Real estate is a whole other issue. The biggest problem with real estate sites is most of them use some cookie cutter hosting/theme CMS system like myrealpage.com which allows for the realtors to use all of the same content and systems set up on a bunch of very similar themes.

[C0ldf1re]

Clay, are you saying this is how Google handles dup content with affiliate sites? or dup content in general..

Clay has it 100%, according to Google's Matt Cutts. It applies to duplicate content in general. After all, Google would find it difficult to separate affiliate sites from other duplicate sites, and would have no reason to try it. (Or no reason that I can think of yet! Another Google-evil-conspiracy-theory may soon emerge...)

[dgswilson]

Have to have something unique. Maybe landing page and install wrdpres-org and make a unique post for each product you have a page for. "This is why I like it, you can check it out here". repeat, repeat ....

[Tiggerito]

I third @claybutler and @C0ldf1re

One way to make you content a little more unique are to allow comments/reviews (non Javascript based) but you need to have the traffic already so you get comments and reviews.

Another technique is to auto construct sentences using a template and the meta data of a product: {product_name} comes in {size_number} sizes from {size_smallest} to {size_largest} and in {colour_number} colours.

[subhzash]

I agree. My client is the official partner for the site from which he want to sell the products. So we have added a caption just below saying that we are official partners for the parent company. One more thing in my client geographical area he is the only official partner to sell his product. I think we don't have any problems with search engines on duplicate content issue.

[bhartzer]

Quote Originally Posted by claybutler View Post
This is not true. Here's how Google handles duplicate content. The algorithm will take all factors into consideration and then present the one it feels is most relevant followed by the others until it runs out of matches. That's it. No penalties and no purging from the SERP's.
When dealing with duplicate content, Google does not present the one that it feels is most relevant. Well, maybe it does?

Google crawls the web. It finds content. The first content that it crawls is the original. All others that it sees after that end up being considered duplicates. Typically, when there are issues with affiliate sites ranking higher then the affiliate site typically has higher PageRank and thus is crawled more often--and thus content is seen first, and considered the originator of the content.

There's really only one way that you can make sure that YOUR content is the original: get your content crawled first. In order to do that, you need links from other pages. And if you have new content, make sure you get links to that new content before someone else does.

[MrGamm]

I know this is probably less than an accurate way to point out how duplicate content might be evaluated... but it is something to consider.

http://www.google.ca/search?q="Toshiba+Satellite+A660-0T4+PSAW3C-0T4017+Notebook+PC"

18,000 results and only 3 pages...

[C0ldf1re]

... 18,000 results and only 3 pages...

That is a spectacular example, proving the point that Panda seems to have worked.

[360Training]

I had similar issues with my previous employer. We have local versions of the corporate site. Local meaning - we have websites with similar content in different countries. For non-English websites, it is okay to just translate the content but with English versions, we encountered duplicate content issues. There was a time that the local websites ranked better than the corporate website for the same keywords.

What you can do as an "emergency action" is differentiate the title of the pages and Meta description like, instead of just "ISO Certification", try "ISO Certification+Country". You may also add the country name on Meta descriptions. As for the content, You can rephrase or change the first 100 words of all pages then rewrite everything if you have enough time. Just do it step-by-step and one at a time.

[stellaex]

Hi All,

My client has signed as a reseller to one of the product selling sites. He wants to build a site to resell the products in other geographical areas where main site is not selling their products.

The client wants to make an exact replica of the site in which he has signed up as reseller. Now my question is does he face duplicate content issues from the search engines? If yes, what are some ways to solve this?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Well according to me the problem of duplicate content will surely exist. Go for some means in order to get the content modified either by spinning or some other means......

[subhzash]

Thanks for all. Now my final conclusion by looking all the posts in this thread is:

1. Even if it is time consuming we have to develop some unique content at lease rewriting the existing descriptions.
2. We should have unique meta data for each page