How to manage duplicate content?

[Mulith]

I have a real estate site that contains a large amount of duplicate content. The site contains listings that appear both on my clients website and on my competitors websites(who have better domain authority). It is critical that the content is there because buyers need to be able to find these listings to make enquiries.

The result is that I have a large number pages that contain duplicate content in some way, shape or form. My search results pages are really the most important ones because these are the ones targeting my keywords. I can differentiate these to some degree but the actual listings themselves are duplicate.

What strategies exist to ensure that I'm not suffereing as a result of this content?

Should I :

1. Make the duplicate content noindex. Yes my results pages will have some degree of duplicate content but each result only displays a 200 character summary of the advert text so not sure if that counts. Would reducing the amount of visible duplicate content improve my rankings as a whole?

2. Link back to the clients site to indicate that they are the original source

Any suggestions?

[kennyrowe]

Is there a way you can add some unique content? Perhaps employ a copywriter to write unique blurbs about the listings? Certainly there are details that will always be the same with you and your competitors as housing listings will always need to have certain details.

For your search results pages, have you optimized the title and meta descriptions on them? This may also help with crafting different pages from your competitors.

[Mulith]

The results pages do have unique meta tags that are dynamically constructed(due to large amount) for onpage SEO and the results pages are rewritten to static urls for indexing.

My results pages actually don't do too badly considering but not sure if the dup content negatively impacts the whole site by way of some unique content vs. dup content sitewide ratio or something.

I encourage users to create a unique 200 character summary for the search results which does help but with over 10000 listings, I think it may be a challenge to get a copywriter to cover it all. Another downside is taking on new clients who may hav a portfolio of 100's of properties. To get them onboard we either create a crawler to retrieve from their site or use a XML document generated by them and distributed to our site and those of our competitors.

I'm hoping we won't be punished for the dup content we just won't rank for it which is fine, but that's just a guess.

We can write unique content though our copyrighter but would it not be better to create a few paragraphs of unique content for each results page. Granted it will take a long time to cover all the pages but the focus would be on improving the ration of unique content vs dup content.

[plata]

Some things to check:

If your search results are being indexed is there only one URL per keyword combination?
Avoid showing the same content on multiple URLs - or restrict the SE bots to just one of them per keyword.

e.g. check you don't have a structure like this:

domain.name/search/location=xyz
domain.name/search/location=xyz&keyword=abc
domain.name/location/keyword

The same applies to the detail pages of your real estate listings.  I.e. don't let the SEs see content on all of these URLs:

domain.name/location/listing_id
domain.name/keyword/listing_id
domain.name/listing_id
domain.name/listing_slug

Rather than making duplicate content noindex I would prefer to redirect it to a common URL if possible.

To reduce duplicate content issues with client material, add extra info to the pages.  E.g. some things to try are:

• adding region/suburb info to search results pages
• pre-parse listings and extract key info on features/facilities/etc., then display that key info in a features box or something so that both the HTML and content differs a lot from client sites.