As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?

[ewanTHH]

As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?

[eunaneunan]

As long as google credits your site as the original author of the content ie google crawls your site before it crawls the site that copied the content.  So yes it will penalize them.

[Adam.Whittles]

It is never a good idea for anyone to copy another site's content. Regardless of the connection between companies, I would always advise on creating unique content for both sites. As you are the original creator of the content, you shouldn't face any penalty but the independent retailer could face duplicate content issues, if they copy the content from your site.

I would certainly advise against the independent retailer copying your content. However, it would probably be more beneficial and suitable to have the retailer link to your site instead.

Hope this helps.

[ewanTHH]

Thanks Adam for your reply,

just to give you a bit more info. We have set up an external XML feed with completely different copy to our website, but all the agents websites are having problems with this. Also it's worth noting that the copy on the XML feed is the same and given to around 15 agents websites in identical form. However these websites are not currently being penalized and often rank higher than us. I believe Google views this websites slightly differently, an example of one would be http://www.homeaway.com. If those only websites to be affected are the agents/retailers then this should already be the case as they all have the same copy on their sites. So if it's not going to harm our website I would be inclined to give them the feed straight from website, which would make our lives easier.

[ewanTHH]

Thanks, this is what I would say under normal circumstances but when these websites require a feed to tell them exactly when a villa is booked or not, so as you don't get double bookings don't you think Google may consider this slightly different?