Looking at creating some auto-generated pages - duplicate content?

[Matt.Carwow]

Hi Everyone!

We just launched a new version of our research site and the main CTA on the page sends users to a subdomain that's blocked by robots.txt. The subdomain link is one of our PPC landing pages and they would be duplicate content for every model (cars).

We're also looking at a new content stream of deals pages, on the main domain. The thought process was that we could rank these pages for things like "Volkswagen golf deals" and also use them as canonical URLs from the PPC pages so that Panda doesn't get mad at us for sending hundreds of links to a subdomain that's blocked.

It's going to take us a lot of time to write the copy for the deals pages, so if we auto-generate it by pulling a paragraph of copy from the car review, and numerical stats about that model, will it be classes as duplicate and/or is there any downside to doing it?

Review Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/car-reviews/Ford/Fiesta

Deals Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/deals/Ford/Fiesta

PPC Landing Page: http://quotes.carwow.co.uk/buy/Ford/Fiesta

I can't help but feel that this may all be a bit overkill and perhaps it makes more sense to build 1 central deals page per model with unique content that we can also send the PPC traffic to, then life any block from the quotes. subdomain. But that will take time and we'd also like a quick solution. I'd also question if it's even an issue to link to a blocked subdomain, Google adds the quote URL into the index but can't crawl it, which I've been told is bad - but is it bad enough to do something about?

Thanks,

JP

[ecommercebc]

First of all, I think your landing pages look awesome. Especially the review page; it's probably one of the most visual/engaging pages I've seen in a long time. The design and content is awesome and you should be really pleased with the result - It really looks great!

However, I do think the deals page looks quite thin, especially as the review pages are _so _strong. Branded3 published a piece  last year on how voucher code websites were impacted by Panda (Source), so I'd be hesitant to use these deals pages. As you state, the quick solution would probably be to roll up all of this content into one article, but I think this would be the best for the consumer, even though it's more time consuming.

[katemorris]

This feels like looking for permission to take a short cut and I personally cannot justify that. I would highly recommend to take the time to make the pages correctly and not even worry about duplicate content or Panda. None of use can tell you if it will "work" or if it'll be seen as duplicate content or when it'll be hit by panda, but if it's auto-generated, I can promise it'll be hit at some point.

However, the worst you can do is test it. Take the top 10% of make/model deal pages and create them how you want. Do it like you're talking and see how they perform. I'm not talking a few weeks, I mean a few months. All the while, be developing the content for some of those pages.

This way, if it works and people like the pages, they are relevant produced the way you want to do it now, the short way, then you can produce the other pages that way. At that point however, your top make/model pages will have unique content that you can put up. So a few months later, you'll have 10% of your deals pages with unique content and the rest automated. Then start working on the next top 10%. Keep going until they are all done.