SEO effect of content duplication across hub of sites

[gmwhite999]

Hello,

I have a question about a website I have been asked to work on.  It is for a real estate company which is part of a larger company. Along with several other (rival) companies it has a website of property listings which receives a feed of properties from a central hub site - so lots of potential for page, title and meta content duplication (if if isn't already occuring) across the whole network of sites.

In early investigation I don't see any of these sites ranking very well at all in Google for expected search phrases.  Before I start working on things that might improve their rankings, I wanted to ask some questions from you guys:

1. How would such duplication (if it is occuring) effect the SEO rankings of such sites individually, or the whole network/hub collectively?

2. Is it possible to tell if such a site has been "burnt" for SEO purposes, especially if or from any duplication?

3. If such a site or the network has been totally burnt, are there any approaches or remedies that can be made to improve the site's SEO rankings significantly, or is the only/best option to start again from scratch with a brand new site, ensuring the use of new meta descriptions and unique content?

Thanks in advance,

Graham

[MetricMarketing]

Hi Graham,

Here are a few insights that hopefully help you out:

1. The site could be penalized individually or as a hub depending on the severity of the duplicate content.

2. Use a tool like Penguin Tool from Baracude Digital to check for penalty. 
   http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

3. Real estate is notorious for duplicate content. If you are doing SEO for a real estate website, your first move should be to restrict access to the listings and then try to identify other types of content you can use to rank. Also, remove as much boilerplate as possible and find something unique, at least a couple of sentences, to write about your listings. Add unique content to pages where duplicate content exists. Add entirely new pages and frequent blog posts rich in original content.

[RyanPurkey]

Duplicate content doesn't tend to burn a website out unless there is aggressive scraping going on as well as other balck hat signals. It sounds like the bigger question you're asking is how can the site be made to have unique content when it, along with many others, are pulling the same MLS content. This was asked about a year ago here: http://moz.com/community/q/real-estate-mls-listings-does-google-consider-duplicate-content, and the general consensus remains the same: try to find a way to make your content unique.