Internal duplicated content on articles, when is too much?

[markovald]

I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model.

So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model.

This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
Rental | Buy new car
Rental:
Free car insurance
Free assistance
etc.
Buy new car
You have to pay insurance
You have to pay assistance
etc. etc.

I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles.

Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?

[BradsDeals]

I have a bunch of questions here that affect how I would answer this.

1. Is there an ecommerce component to the site where you're also actually renting cars?
2. Is the goal to get people to rent your cars? Is it ad impressions? Is it generating external links to a third party? Is it revenue through affiliate partnerships with one or multiple car rental agencies?
3. If a conversion is a rental, does that happen on your site or on another site?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I think the content you have listed above would be better suited for a static "Renting vs Buying a Car"-esque page. You can continually update this with new best practices and standards, as well as tips and advice for users looking for this information and apply it. You can also spin this content into infographics, video, how to guides, and email material, thus keeping it fresh and useful for other channels if needed.

Point being - this isn't information you need to be repeating. I would keep specific models posts specific to the models themselves and instead link to the page with this information if the users want it. That way, you have one static page trying to capture that traffic, internal links pointing to it, and also remove issues with duplicate content.

Let me know if this makes sense. Hope this helps - good luck!

[markovald]

Hi Rebecca, and thank hou for you reply!

1. I have a website where you can rent car. In the same site i have a blog. The goal of the blog is to make reviews about the cars, catch some long tail keywords from users that are searching for car rental and drive visits to the car "product pages" on the site (when you can ask a quote).
2. Exactly, the goal of the blog is to catch visitors from Google and drive this visitors on the product page of the car. We have a partnership (because we are a broker), but is "whitelabel"
3. On the same site. XXX.com is the site, and the blog are in /blog directory.

Sorry for the bad english, i hope that is clear.

[BradsDeals]

Okay, so my first reaction is that the articles you're describing are probably better suited to the car rental pages themselves. That's where the conversion is going to happen, so that's where you want that long-tail, long-term content to live. Plus, since it's pretty formulaic, it's a good fit for an ecommerce page where that kind of info duplication is going to be expected.

For the blog itself, I would shoot for unique, aspirational articles. Getting a rental car isn't about the car - it's about the destination. Lists of great road-trip destinations stuffed with gorgeous stock photos. Infographics about where and when to buy gas. Tips for finding the best gas prices away from home. Go for shareability, not for SEO. Then promote the hell out of it on social.

[markovald]

Thank you for your reply.Technically speaking, this duplication can be penalized or devalued by Google?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Potentially - Google isn't a fan of duplicate content, especially extrapolated across potentially hundreds of blog posts.

[markovald]

Thank you Rebecca.

The site is the long time rental (12 months to 3 years) so i can't relate on vacations or tour...the customers are generally firms or professional people that want to use a car without all the issues related on bying.

[BradsDeals]

Sure, but do you see where I'm going with that line of thought? It's never actually about the car. It's what the car enables - in your case, cost savings, someone else is responsible for maintenance, etc. Maybe case studies, testimonials from businesses that have made the switch. I'd also be pitching stories to online business publications. Don't limit yourself to dry technical details.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

I just want to clear something up about duplicate content - Google doesn't penalise for it...

John Mueller - Google
John clearly states  “We don’t have a duplicate content penalty. It’s not that we would demote a site for having a lot of duplicate content.” and “You don’t get penalized for having this kind of duplicate content” in which he was talking about very similar pages. John says to “provide… real unique value” on your pages.

What this means is that if you have little chunks of text as you mention, this won't be an issue. You won't get penalised or demoted for it and I have a lot of clients who are testament to this. If this content helps the user experience, then it will be fine.

Of course, the better the content, the more chance you have to rank well - try to make every page as unique and useful as possible.

You can see more and watch the video with John here.

-Andy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Andy

This is true - but what I was getting at was the devaluation aspect - Google can devalue content that is duplicated.

Sorry for not clarifying on this. Thanks for including this from John.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No probs Patrick. Sometimes it's unavoidable and would depend a lot more on the overall quality / trust of the site in general. When you say devalued, in this case the duplicate content would likely just be ignored - is this what you mean?

That's not to say that everyone should go out and duplicate chunks of content - continue to focus heavily on making the content as good as it can possibly be.

-Andy