Duplicate content [Business thread, sigwhores not allowed]
 

Free site owners, do you use descriptions provided by sponsors or write your own / have someone write for you? Is it a bad idea to mix custom written text with sponsor provided descriptions? How strict are search engines in penalizing duplicate content?

Discuss, thanks.

i usually mix my own descriptions with existing descriptions, then change keywords in the existing descriptions leaving the majority of the text intact. seo seems to like this.

My knowledge (limited that it is) leads me to believe that duplicate content just gets discounted at the second location onwards it's discovered.

However I'm not an SEO expert, but the price to get descriptions and text written is so cheap it's in my opinion just worth doing.

Anything worth doing, is worth doing well.

with that in mind. take the time to write, or rewrite the descriptions if you are working towards the SE goal.

Farang .... returns ...... sorta glad you're not dead.


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A mixture of using existing descriptions and altered descriptions and writing my own.

I don't normally pick on how other people write on the internet as a lot of people don't have English as a first language but for some reason I can turn into a grammer-nazi and tidy up badly written existing descriptions too.

I always mixed up to prevent any double content ranking problems

Can't you read the thread title?

original on money sites. for link pyramid network don't give a fuck. would never use sponsor provided description on anything i would try and rank.

as far as dupe content, an authority site can dupe all they want, a non-authority can not.

I think there's no doubt about being penalized if you're just taking pre-packaged text and using it for most of your text content. I think it's also reasonable to expect that the larger the percentage of pre-packaged text you have, the more likely the penalty is. If it's only a tiny percentage of your site, then you're more likely to be considered unique, because you actually are unique.

I mean shoot, if you shop at the Gap, and next door is...... the Gap.... well.. one of them needs to just go away.

As far as how strict, well I dont know.. but it sounds like the perfect task for a bot to do.

I have a custom script based on the Feed Pushers code that morphs existing descriptions from sponsors for my own network of sites. As a rule, I prefer NON-morphed content to the fake "morphing" most sponsors do and call it "morphing feeds" ...

your domain isnt penalized, it just doesnt get picked up.

I had a lot of blogs kicked out of Google for using descriptions as they were - I mean the blogs are still listed but get zero Google traffic (and the picture was different a few years ago).

One (sweet and lazy) way around this is to replace words with synonymous, but I would advise you to also randomize your entries well. Say you have a database of url|descr|thumb from at least 5-6 different sponsors, first randomize the entries, replace crapload of words with their synonymous (description field only) and then use them in your sites or blogs.


PS If this didn't make sense to any of you, don't sweat it ;)

I think it would be rather dumb knowing anything basic about SEO and dup cont to NOT change descriptions from default.

So really, this is a silly question...

Like Lpink said though.... good to see youre not in a bath tub with a ladyboys stilleto sticking out of your neck...