Online Marketing - Marketing Don

Creating Unique Content For Google

Some of what I am about to write may not be new to some of you, others will be blown away.  I have been researching what Google defines as duplicate content for a few years now.  I want to share what I have found.

December 18, 2006 Adam Lasnik (you may remember him, he is the Google employee that sent me the pain killers) wrote an article about Duplicate Content

Adam wrote: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” This all makes sense to me.  Google does not want the top ten results to show identical content.  This wouldn’t be good for the original writer of the content, nor Google searchers.  What I am looking for is, what is the definition of “appreciably similar?”  Google will not post what percent of the content must be different to be seen as different content. 

In the latest article written by Google Team Member Sven Naumann, posted June 9, 2008,  Duplicate Content Due To Scrapers Sven writes,

Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate content:

• Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site
• Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites

For “Within-your-domain-duplicate-content” Sven recommends blocking what you don’t want Google to claim as the main content and using the Sitemap to tell Google which page is the main one.

For “Cross-domain” content, Sven writes, “we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.”

One of the most important sentences in Sven’s entire post is, “I’d like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”

So what does this mean to you?  This means if you sell the same products that a major brand sells and a 100 other sites sell, if your content is the same or similar, it will most likely not rank because Google will deem the brands website “original one.”  Your product page will be filtered out and not shown in the top results.

One thing I would like to add, that is not discussed in either article, is your title and description tags.  Even though these are only a sentence or two, I had tested and noted that duplicate description tags will be considered duplicate content and will cause Google to “filter out” pages.  You should have unique title and description tags anyway, but same or similar tags will have a dramatic affect on your indexing/ranking of pages.

So, what is the magic number that Google uses to deem a page similar?  In my opinion, there isn’t one.  Like Google’s algorithm, it is very complex and based on several factors (vertical, theme, how many words are on the page, site layout, density, sentence structure, proximity of words, etc…)  For all websites, you can not randomly say, “if you change 20% of your copy, Google will treat it as unique.”  Basically, you want the bot to think your page is unique even though it contains a lot of the same information, but is worded differently than other sites.

To get cross domain similar pages and articles indexed, you can either add totally new content or try my recommendations below:

1. 100% unique title and description tags.  Don’t even look at the other sites tags.
2. Depending on the amount of copy, try not to have more than 2 sentences in a row exactly the same within the page.  The first few sentences of the copy must be different.  There are ways to change the wording, but still say the same thing.  This is key is trying to get your point across without duplication.
3. Re-arrange the paragraph order.  If there are 3 paragraphs, can the middle one be worded so that it can be moved to the first position?  This combined with re-arranging some of the sentences will help the page appear unique to bots. 
4. Remember, Google is looking at density, number of words, theme, etc.. so adding a new unique SEO optimized first paragraph will help.  Change some of the words towards the end of the page using a thesaurus.  For example, if you have a page selling a particular brand and model shoe, towards the bottom page add the term “footwear” replacing some of “shoe” text. 
5. If you have 100’s or 1000’s of pages like this, there are ways to automate the process.  It is easier when adding new pages.  The title tags can be created based on the unique new title you give to the product (again rearrange the words).  This product title will be placed on your page as well.  When content is added, there are ways to rearrange how it is laid out and written, developers can help with this.  It still needs to be readable, but if you are concerned about duplicate content, the tedious task of making these tweaks are a must.
6. When I am all done, I would like to see a new SEO optimized first paragraph and the remaining copy to adhere to the steps 1 thru 5 above.  Yes, it takes time, but it is better than adding all these product pages just for them to be “filtered out.”

Feel free to test.  Test a category or a few product pages.  Make the changes above and see if it makes a difference.  There are no guarantee’s when it comes to Google’s algorithm and there are 100’s of other factors involved in natural rankings, but making these changes should help Googlebot consider your pages unique.