Real Estate Blogging Best Practices around Duplicate Content

By frerecks • June 16th, 2008

"Can I copy content that I find potentially valuable to my audience to my Real Estate Blog ?"

We get ‘the ‘Duplicate Content question’ quite often and our answer [generally] tries to address the question for both search engines and for humans. Obviously plagiarizing someones’ content is never acceptable and it CAN get you into trouble; however, you may be able to excerpt safely. An excerpt in 1) block quotes that is 2) significantly less than half the post and that 3) credits the author with a live link should keep you within generally accepted guidelines. Admittedly, this advice is based upon what the consensus agrees is accepted.

Google isn’t that far off, defining duplicate content as "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar." They add, "Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin… In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries." And finally they add you should not concern yourself with occasional snippets or quotes being identified as duplicate content; however, in the event you go to far and are removed from the search results you should visit webmaster guidelines. If the problem is corrected based upon webmaster guidelines you are entitled to submit your site for reconsideration. 

But what does Google share about the consequences for duplicating content? Apparently, during spider crawling and then the serve of a search result, Google trusts its algorithm to rank similar pages accurately. Apparenly those filters also identify actual attempts at manipulation and when they do see it manual adjustments are made; however, Google admits it would much rather rely on filters than on manual rank adjustments.

Now, they don’t define "adjustments" and its’ probably by design, but one can certainly conclude manual adjustment lies somewhere between lower rank to complete removal. *Rule of thumb here- don’t make a short sighted mistake and risk your time, effort, money and future business by abusing duplication.*

In the post ‘When Duplicate content really hurts’ SEOMoz.org’s Eric Enge suggests, "Conventional wisdom among experienced SEOs is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. There are exceptions to this rule. Search engines implement a filter… there is apparently a duplicate content threshold where Google’s filter will identify and actually penalize a site." He says, "I write this based upon a combination of heresay and also some experience we’ve had we could only speculate about." Enge also warns that Search Engine spiders only visit with so much crawl bandwidth or what he refers to as budget. If you waste those crawls on content that won’t be indexed successfully, you are sacrificing other useful content that could have been indexed. In a similar instance we [Real Estate Blog sites] also can only speculate about, we had a client copying the lead story from their local newspaper pretty regularly. Despite our warnings, one day they disappeared from the SERPs [search engine results pages] wiping out any potential they may have had for consumer search findability.

Client and Malibu CA Real Estate Blogger Judy Kunisaki mentioned just today, "my clients are constantly saying they found me via, or that they have read, my Blog." Her comment serves as a perfect example of one marketing asset that should NOT ever be risked and let’s face it, home buyers and sellers aren’t only searching they are researching!  So, I’m certain no Advertorial Blog owner would ever want removal. Demonstrate trustworthiness, knowledge and a value- adding local presence on the web because what the search engines don’t penalize you for, humans most certainly will. And please, don’t duplicate content outside the generally accepted guidelines, use care and use good reason!

Contributed by
chris@kineticknowledge.com


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