If we use content copied from another site ( assuming we have not plagerized), does it hurt our Google Rankings?

[huskers]

We have permission from another company to copy their content and use it on our site.  This happens when we are describing a manufacturer's product and we copy pages from their site and add these pages to our site in order to describe the product we are selling.  Is this considered duplicate content?  Can this practice hurt us?

[EvolveCreative]

Yes, this would be considered duplicate. It's debatable whether or not it will hurt your website though - especially since the other company published the content on the web before you. You may want to look into Google's experimental Meta Tags to specify the original source of content here:

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283

I'm honestly not sure if this would actually help the situation though. I'd recommend writing your own content if you have time.... anyone else care to expand on this?

[brandonjschwartz]

I would add a slight caveat and say that if the copied content is a majority of what appears on those pages, you might be fine.

[rickjamestmg]

Using a canonical URL to point to the original source of the story should avoid any penalties from Google, correct?

[brandonjschwartz]

You might avoid penalties, but you risk getting the page de-indexed altogether because Google thinks that the "canonical" page is on the manufacturer's site. Assuming this is a product page, de-indexation would probably suck.

[EvolveCreative]

I've never heard of a page getting de-indexed for something like this. Do you have an example? I'm actually very interested in this topic. There are so many eCommerce stores in the exact same situation as Paul.

After Penguin, I'm just not sure what to think anymore.

[brandonjschwartz]

I actually spent quite a bit of time last night looking this up because I thought I had read about this happening. To be honest, I can't find anything. I have found some posts, such as this one, where canonical errors were picked up and adversely affected a site's results. But I can't find a specific example of a site that copied something like manufacturer descriptions and referenced the original source in a canonical tag, then being deindexed. Perhaps I mispoke.

That said, you're right, things are pretty confusing sometimes. A lot of people are in positions like Paul and rewriting product pages to be entirely unique is very costly. If I were Paul, I'd eat the costs of hiring a copywriter to push out new product descriptions rather than take a chance with the algorithm. It would be painful, but if e-commerce revenue is a significant portion of his business it might be worth it in the long run.

[EvolveCreative]

Thanks for looking into it. The post you reference is indeed interesting. Looks like Google is taking the canonical attribute pretty seriously. I guess we'll just have to observe the changes for now.

[huskers]

Todd,

Thanks for your response.  Allow me to expand on our challange.  We are an ACE Hadware store and sell hardware online.  We have about 60,000 SKU's in our online stores.  We have two problems when it comes to duplicate content.

First, all of our product content comes from ACE Hardware's catalogue.  Since ACE Hardware also has an online store, all of our content will be exactly the same as ACE Hardware's.  So it's duplicate.

Second, we frequently copy manufacturer's information and insert it into our site to help decribe a produc't features and benefits.  So once agasin it duplicate.

With 60,000 SKU's it's not possible to rewrite all the copy, besides how many different ways can you describe a hammer.

Thanks,

Paul