Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?

[Chemometec]

Hi,

My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop.

Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it.

With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I  am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content.

If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)?

What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content?

Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us.

Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers,

Cheers,

Dusan

[MonicaOConnor]

Hi Dusan,

I have a couple of suggestions for you. The first, to answer your question, is that copyscape.com will let you compare two pieces of content for free, and then it will tell you the percentage of uniqueness. This will be a good way to tell if your rewrites are adequate.

My second suggestion is to implement a review system that will stream user generated content onto your pages. The duplicate content "penalty" you are referring to is really not a penalty in the empirical sense. When it comes to ranking, Google will look at two sites with the same content and pick one to display. Usually the branded site would win in a branded search. There are many other factors, like page rank and domain authority that can influence which page is displayed, and the user query can influence that as well.

Having uniquely valuable content on your site, like user generated comments and reviews, can be the offset for your duplicate content issue. Rewriting the manufacturer's descriptions isn't really going to accomplish the goal of offering the searcher something they can't find anywhere else. In my opinion, just rewriting the content isn't enough of an advantage to beat out other sites. You have to offer something valuable, that can only be found on your site. User generated content is (in my opinion) the best content you can have. Every consumer reads reviews when they are available. They want to find out what regular people have to say about a product. Is is the right size, is the color consistent, how long did it last, is this a fair price? These are all questions that can be answered in a review system.

I added reviews to my Ecommerce site about 6 months ago and have seen great success. 80% of my content is the same as 4 other sites, except my category pages. I write extremely unique content for those pages, which helps me target long tail and branded key terms. Then my product pages have the manufacturer's descriptions, tech specs and warranty info plus the user generated content. It has been very successful whenever I have implemented it.

[donford]

Monica said basically everything I would and probably a little better. The review system is extremely helpful in generating unique content, for a few reasons. One, you don't have to write it yourself (just review it), second customers want to hear from other customers, third the way a user describes a product may actually attract keyword opportunities you may not have thought of on your own.

[Houses]

I would add that if you are going to have user generated content, make sure there's a review process so it doesn't get spammed/abused.

[Chemometec]

Thank you Monica, really good answer!

Now, with copyscape.com what is the percentage of uniqueness that is 'allright'?

We are selling laboratory products for cell analysis, tittles and descriptions of our products are highly scientific. Manufacturer is the only one who can write it. Re-writing is our only option.

However, i am not that scared of being penalies any more. Thank you very much!

[MonicaOConnor]

I think you should stay above 90% unique.

I would strongly encourage you to make sure you add user generated content to the pages. Even rewriting the content to be exactly unique will not be enough to guarantee your pages can rank. The content is going to be written in unique words, but it will essentially be the same thing. You will need something that is uniquely valuable to the user.

No you won't necessarily be penalized, but, it will become harder to rank in branded searches.

[Chemometec]

Thank you again Monica. The reviews are definitely be implemented. Good luck!