Duplicate Content

[realestate4sale]

I know that this topic has been covered to a great extent but I have many clients in many cities that I need to have similar content for. How much Dup content is too much? Is there any way to get around dupicate content. I see many large real estate lead generating websites with dup content and they seem not to get banned such as homegain.com- servicemajic.com and others. Somehow they are getting around it.

[bhartzer]

Duplicate content can be very tricky, and essentially I go by the 25% rule. Pages need to be at least 25 percent different than other pages in order to not be consider duplicates.

You can use copyscape.com to check for duplicate content. If your page passes the copyscape test, then it's definitely not duplicate content.

I cannot speak for the websites that you mention specifically, as I have not taken the time to analyze all of their sites and pages. However, keep in mind that what you're actually seeing may or may not be what the search engine spider is seeing when they visit those sites. I understand that there's a lot of affiliates involved, as well, so it's going to be tough to determine exactly why they appear to be "getting away with it" like you suggest.

[oneofthe3lions]

In some instances I have copied text from another website (with consent)and added their link underneath to say to our readers, ''read more of this article here'' for example.. Therefore my copy is duplicate, apart from of course my layout, styles etc.. just the text is duplicate...

Will this be penalised and if so how?

I dont mind this page not being found through the search engines, its not optimised for that, it's just to add content to our users, but will other pages get penalised?

[cyanide]

I can't really confirm officially, but I understand that articles are exempt somehow from the dup penalty.
Although, I'm not quite sure how google identifies a page to be that of an article.
But it does make sense. Think of how many freelance writers have their articles all over multiple big noteable websites

[rlrouse]

In most cases the HTML code, navigation, etc. will account for enough of a difference to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

[realestate4sale]

Can search engine spiders tell the difference in text colors, font sizes, table sizes, etc. Would this help in this situation?

Thanks to all who have replied to this post.

[sfowler]

All those factors change the code, which is what the spider sees, so it will help.