I'm worried my client is asking me to post duplicate content, am I just being paranoid?

[steve_benjamins]

Hi SEOMozzers,

I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries.

My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content.

So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media).

My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent.

I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content.

Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid?

Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community

[irvingw]

Welcome aboard!

Content needs to be unique especially if you want to rank.

How many pages are we talking about, I would suggest you get the content re-written by someone if it's not a ton of pages.

[steve_benjamins]

Thanks Irving. It's only for 8 pages right now- but my client plans on posting more destinations (and thus more not-so-unique-content) in the future.

Re-writing is something I hadn't considered. That may be a more cost-efficient idea. Thanks for the idea!

[SEO5Team]

Hi Steven,

Welcome to this community. The ideal response to your question would be to take the content that the client is providing and come up with unique content based on that material. So essentially rewriting those content pieces and giving your own flavor to them. Now , of course, due to various reasons that might not be possible (time, budget, resources). In that case it's best to give credit to the original source where you got the content from, when you add it to the site. More info in the links below:

Duplicate Content

Hubspot Post on content

[irvingw]

Definitely sounds scalable for this site. Taking this type of shortcut with scraped content won't work. I would call it just that when you talk to the client, it's a "shortcut using scraped content" that Google has caught onto and suppressed. If the client is skeptical show him a link to the official Google forum where they talk against this.

Rewriting the content is easy and provides little hand holding, just make sure the person doing the writing has good writing skills and has English as a first language or it will read funky and at the end of the day you are creating content for the user. This is also the perfect opportunity to get a few instances of your keyword phrase into the content where it probably wasn't there before in the copied content!

[CMC-SD]

As an additional tip, you can use a service like Copyscape to verify whether or not the content has been posted elsewhere online.

[steve_benjamins]

Very helpful- I'm moving forward with this advice!

[MarieHaynes]

I work with a lot of sites that have been affected by Panda and the type of thing that you are talking about doing is exactly the type of thing that has gotten most of these sites flagged by Panda.

You're client is right that it is a good idea to have text next on the pages.  But, if the text is not unique then what Google does is say, "This page is essentially the same as one that is already in our index.  There's no reason showing two identical pages to searchers so we won't show this one."  If enough of your pages are duplicates then the whole site (including original pages) can be flagged by Panda.