Purchasing duplicate content

[BackPack85]

Morning all,

I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well.

I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[EGOL]

I would be thinking about these topics....

**  How many other companies are purchasing or have purchased this data?   Is it out there on lots of sites and the number is growing?

**  Since this is a low-ranking competitor, how much additional money would be required to simply buy the entire company (provided that the data is not already out there on a ton of other websites.)

**  Rather than purchasing this content, what would be the cost of original authorship for just those words that produce a big bulk of the traffic.   Certainly 10% of the content produces over 50% of the traffic on most reference sites.

**  With knowledge that in most duplicate content situations, a significantly stronger site will crush the same content on the original publisher.... where do I sit in this comparison of power?

[brettmandoes]

Wow, this is a loaded question. The way I see it we can break this up into two parts.

First, subdomains vs. domains vs. subpages. There has been a lot of discussion surrounding which structure should be used for SEO friendliness and to keep it really simple, if you're concerned about SEO then using a subpage structure is going to be the most beneficial. If you create a separate domain, that will be duplicate content and it does impact rankings. Subdomains are a little more complex, and I don't recommend them for SEO. In some cases, Google views subdomains as spam (think of all the PBNs created with blogspot.com) and in other cases it's viewed as a separate website. By structuring something as a subdomain you're indicating that the content is different enough from the main content of the root domain that you don't feel it should be included together. An example of this being used in the wild appropriately might be different language versions of a website, which especially makes sense in countries where the TLD doesn't represent multiple languages (like Switzerland - they have four national languages).

Next, the concept of duplicate content is different depending on whether it's duplicate internally, or duplicate externally. It's common for websites to have a certain amount of duplicate or common content within their own website. The number that has been repeated for years as a "safe" threshold is 30%, which is a stat that Matt Cutts threw out there before he retired. I use siteliner.com to discover how much common content has been replicated internally. Externally, if you have the same content as another website, this can pretty dramatically impact your rankings. Google does a decent job of assigning content to the correct website (who had it first, etc.) but they have a long way to go.

If you could assimilate the new content and have the pages redirected on a 1:1 basis to the new location then it's probably safe enough to do, and hopefully you will have it structured in a way that makes it useful to users. If you can't perform the redirect, I think you're more likely to struggle with achieving SEO goals for those new pages. In that case, take the time to set realistic expectations and track something like user engagement between new and old content so you have a realistic understanding of your success and challenges.

[BackPack85]

Thanks for the great response, some really useful thoughts.

To address your final point, the site is considerably stronger than the content creator's so it's reassuring to hear that this could be the case. Of course we'll be recommending that as much of the data as possible is curated and that the pages are improved with original content/