Duplicate biographies across several domains?

[Wayne76]

Hey Gang,

We've built a niche specific, manually edited legal community that is full of unique content. (While it's ultimately a directory, and that is often viewed as a bad word in these times, ours is a curated source that doesn't allow anyone and everyone to join.) We feel comfortable that it passes the sniff test post-panda/penguin, etc., and its doing rather well to date.

The question we have is do we really need to create unique biographies for each of our legal members? Some of our competitors simply use the same bio information that the lawyer has on their own website and copies that to their site. The competitors I'm talking about are LARGE, well-respected, extremely successful folks, like FindLaw.

Here's an example:

Lawyer's website bio

FindLaw website bio

Both rank, etc., and the FindLaw code doesn't place any restrictions on their content regarding the bio., and it's an obvious exact match.

I get that duplicate content is primarily a concern among one's own URL and the pages across a specific domain, using rel-canonical, etc., but what about two different domains that need to supply factual information that can't be altered? Is it anything we should worry ourselves with? Any tags we should insert in our code with regard to the bios?

Thanks!!!

Wayne

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You will have a much easier time ranking if you provide unique biographies instead of scraping something that already appears on several websites. Like you said, those sites are huge and have a lot of authority so they will rank and you wont.

However, if the scraped bio is just a portion of the page and the rest of the page is unique, valuable information, that would help offset the copied content. Next time a panda refresh comes around, you'll know if you got hit with a duplicate content penalty.

-Oleg

[Wayne76]

Thanks, Oleg! I was thinking along the same lines, but it's a bit difficult to reproduce a person's biography, as it is such specific information, e.g., Schools they graduated from, where they worked, experience, etc. And since that's the only information on that page, it makes it a bit tough, indeed!