How to measure the penalty of duplicate content if we populate our provider bios on WebMD?

[Account-Owner]

I work for a large healthcare system and we have an initiative to populate 2,500 of our our provider bios on WebMD. The proposed method for providing content is to supply it via API, in exactly the same way provider bio content appears on our site.

When my colleague and I pointed out this would be an anti-practice as it would be disseminating duplicate content, we were asked to weigh:

1. The penalty of the duplication
2. The time and resources necessary to provide an alternative method (i.e., is there a programmatic way to supply unique content to WebMD)

A few other questions we are investigating is if we can include links to each provider bio from WebMD to our main site. If this is the case, we can include a very short intro and direct users to our site if they want to learn more. The benefit of being included on WebMD is showing up for searches pertaining to expertise/specialties, as this will open our system to new users who likely won't search our providers by name.

Any advice on how to measure the potential effect of displaying duplicate content on WebMD, considering their impressive domain authority?

[rjonesx. 0]

You aren't going to suffer a penalty from this. There really is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty", just the chance that you will be out-ranked. If you want to quantify the potential risk, just look at all the organic traffic to those bio pages on your site and determine what would happen were you to lose rankings for some percentage of them. My guess is that you won't lose rankings dramatically and, when you do, it will just be the 1 position supplanted by a now-even-better ranking from WebMD.

That being said, duplicate content is best if you can avoid it. If it is possible, find a way to modify the bios on-the-fly as they are syndicated. Make sure you include brand mentions in the opening paragraph (you could use a boilerplate sentence or two to start off each bio).

[CleverPhD]

Just to follow-up on Russ' point, if you want to estimate cost.  Contract out a couple part-time writers to go and do some web research on the providers and rewrite the bios/profiles.  You will need someone from your internal team to supervise the part-timers who is familiar with the healthcare industry and writing to look through and make sure that what the writers put down is correct.  This should take you 4-6 months.  Your costs will be the 60-70% salary for the full-time person (as they will not just be doing this project), plus plan to pay about 20 bucks an hour for 20 hours a week from each part timer.   You can adjust and get another (third) part-timer if you like for a bit more cost but faster results.

We did this for about 2,000 locations for a site I work on.  We found that you would not want to have anyone doing this full-time as they would probably go insane and quality suffers.  Find a way to break up the tasks so that persons spend part of the time researching, part time proofing the other's work and part time writing.  Helps with a better output.  Sure, you could use software to "spin" the bios, but they would come out looking like crapola. That was why we used people and were happy with the results.

We did see a significant jump in our organic traffic, so for us it was worth it.  You may take a look and decide not to, but wanted to put this option out there.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

I just want to address a point that has been missed here because duplicate content across domains is one of the Panda signals to Google and can end up resulting in an algorithm hit. Remember that how Google treats your own internal duplicate content and that on an external site are very different.

A good rule of thumb is do NOT expect to rank high in Google with content found on other, more trusted sites, and don’t expect to rank at all if all you are using is automatically generated pages with no ‘value add’.

Have a read of this article as it runs through lots of information regarding duplicate content. Here is another excerpt to be mindful of...

…in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. GOOGLE.

I would never advise duplicating content to be used across different domains - this is a very bad practice and one that should be avoided at all costs.

CleverPhD has advised the best way to handle this and re-write the content for the Bios.

-Andy

[ClaytonJ]

Andy, glad I read that post - a great one. Thanks.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problem at all John - please reply back if you have any other questions.

-Andy

[CleverPhD]

Thanks Andy for sharing that post!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No worries

[Account-Owner]

Thanks, all. I'll present these findings to our organization and we'll go from there.