Matt Cutts answer on duplicate detection

[Emark2009]

So Matt Cutts says in his videos that Google does:

- exact duplicate detection
- near duplicate detection

His advice on duplicated content is: "make sure your pages are quite different from each other"

Ok, this doesn't bring us much further..

Question:
A friend of mine sells online travel packages in Brazil on his website. I have a site about Brazil as well and recently he asked me: "Why don't you sell my packages on your site? So i agreed!

Something like:
Day 1
Arrival at airport. Transfer to hotel. Late night city trip.
Day 2
Early breakfast. Jeep-safari with guide. Evening: brazilian dinner
Day 3
Visit to historical part of city
Day 4
Transfer to airport

(off course with a lot more details)

I am planning to copy these travel packages to my site. Same content, different layout.

Should i worry about duplicated content?

[bj]

Did you ask this question on Matt Cutt's forum? I'd be interested in hearing the answer.

[kgun]

Use Pablo Picasso's technique, "steal" and make it unreckognizeable.

I read somewhere that he said. If I see a motive / picture I like, I steal it and make it unreckognizeable.

I think he shall also have said. "I have not done anything else during my life then spculate in peoples bad taste."

I disagree to the last sentence. He has some wonderful paintings, and his (good) paintings increase in real value (appreciates) year after year.

[jackson992]

Interesting since usually it's not a problem if you duplicate content withon the same site

[shellared]

Many merchants use the vendor's copy for their marketing. I've seen advice that if you're thinking about doing this, don't.

Change the copy and you should be good to do.

What a pita. Especially if you sell widgets with some tech specs and the same selections and no sales pitch to the copy. How do you make the tech specs differ from your competitors? Imagine selling hundreds of types of nails, screws, nuts and bolts and having to add copy to each just to be different so you;re not dropped from G.

[visio]

I would not give much importance about the duplicate content within the same site or not, I have'nt yet come across any penalty because of duplicate content.

[Emark2009]

Just to be clear: i'm talking about 2 different sites !!

Kgun,interesting point !
Allthough in some cases allmost impossible to put into practice, like Shellared illustrates.

[jacobwissler]

It would appear obvious that certain types of websites would almost have to contain dupplicate content, such as a hotel, rental car, airline or travel sites that asked for the date of departure. There are only so many different ways to phrase it.

[mnsandy]

I agree, steal and change, thats the way to go or we call it also Article Rewriting and adding additional content:)

good luck my friend :)))

[pemburung]

We have concerns about the same issue. We have various itineraries to show the different things we can do in an area. Naturally, some things are the same, and so we just cut and past those days. As the itineraries are detailed, one 3 week itinerary can run 3 or 4 pages (for fast loading time as we use images to illustrate; we care about those good folks out there without DSL or who - gasp - actually surf from home for private things and not the office). This means it's possible for a few pages to be be very similar, or even identical, if the breaks occur just so. Now, we've spent a fair amount of time polishing up these day descriptions to be just right, and don't want to go changing them, and why should we spend the time, which is money. Yes, we could use a noindex command, but then someone looking for detailed search strings may not find us. A page that happens to get linked to by others, and should appear high, may be just the one - in fact you know it will be - that is noindexed.

We also put clients' itineraries on our site, so they and friends can access them, and naturally a lot of these have very similar content. While we can, and do, also noindex these, we leave those to be indexed that have some different content, and do get inquiries based on those itineraries when people are searching. Again, these will have some very similar content to other parts of our website.

On the issue of duplicated material off-site,there is the issue of reselling someone else's tour, as the original poster described. We are international, and a lot of people prefer to buy a foreign tour in their own country, rather than deal directly with an overseas operator, or, we represent some foreign tours. Once again, the tour operator has spent time making the description just right; it's a complete waste of time to change it for the sake of it.

All of this is good for the searcher; they find the sort of results their longtail searches are looking for. Personally, I hate looking for something, and finding six different descriptions that all turn out to be the same product. It wastes my time. It's absolutely legitimate for different resellers to be selling the same thing, as many offer different services around the product. But if it's the same product, I want to know that up front. Google is making everyone waste time with this issue, as far as off-site duplication goes.

I guess it comes down to this; if Google wants to start dropping pages and sites from its index, and given its gazillion dollar income using other people's content, then it has a responsibility to make sure it is not harming those people - actually de facto business partners - by its actions. Few sites should be dropped by algo; most sites should be hand checked to see if it is in fact legitimately using dupe content. While there may be some obvious dupe content sites that could be identified by algo, at some stage there occurs a huge gray area. And so far Google has not shown mcuh finesse with gray.