How do I avoid the dupe penalty.

[Eric Johnson]

Hey guys I'm putting up the same sales page on three different url's.

I would be happy if the three sales pages were identicle because I'm just taking opportunity of preexisting traffic to these url's.

BUT, Google gives you a dupe penalty when you have the exact same content on different sites. I obviously want to avoid that but I really don't understand how it works.

How much do I need to change...does the headline need to be different...etc...etc...etc

Thanks guys.

[Kay King]

The duplicate content penalty that Google used is concerned with using the SAME pages again and again on ONE site to make the site seem larger.

Some time ago this was a rather common practice. Site owners would write one page and just repeat that same content on pages within a site.

If you look up any product being sold online you are likely to find several url's with the same or almost the same sales page.

I would advise the sites be hosted on different servers as I think (no proof) hosting three identical sites on one server might hurt SEO of the sites. I could be totally wrong about that - but seems like a good idea to spread them out a bit.

kay

[UcheO]

If you're worried about duplicate content - then change the content. If you have three different domains, make three different variations of the sales page. Include different testimonials, reword the content, use different images, get creative. Otherwise you could simply have the other two domains redirect to a single domain that has the sales page on it.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by Eric Johnson

Google gives you a dupe penalty when you have the exact same content on different sites.

Opinions in this forum seem to differ rather a lot as to whether that's true, I've noticed. Some people seem to think that it's only duplicated material on the same domain that Big G penalises.

[Floyd Bogart]

Yeah, it seems to me that what you have is a great opportunity to split test three different versions of a salesletter.

Why not take advantage of the existing traffic this way?

[Bill Farnham]

I've heard so many different opinions about duplicate content I decided a few months ago to simply create a website using mostly duplicate content as a test so I could see for myself what the results would be.

I chose a competetive market and based the site on a keyword that had a lot search volume.

There are NO backlinks to this site. I did that so I could isolate the results and not have it skewed by outside influences.

Well, that site has been climbing up the Google charts over time and has a first page ranking (#6) on MSN for the targeted keyword.

So from my perspective, I have reason to believe that the Dupe Penalty is a myth if we are talking about the same content on different sites.

Your milage my vary, but for me this test was fairly conclusive.

KJ

[tommygadget]

The one thing that Google HATES is websites with 1,000 pages of exactly the same content except one or two elements. Here's an example: php server script creates web pages from a database for all 50 states and all the counties within each state and stuffs them into templates. The result looks like this: mesothelioma attorneys in dallas, texas and then mesothelioma attorneys in longhorn texas, etc., etc. Google will slap your site down hard for something like this.

TomG.

[Mike Montgomery]

the only thing you need to worry about when
it comes to dupe content is that you shouldn't
have the same content more than once on the
same site.

Otherwise nothing has ever been proven that
having the same content on two different sites
will get you penalized.

[jasonl70]

As a lot of people have pointed out already, the dup content penalty is for pages on the same site - not different domains.

[Seattle Mike]

As a test I added an extra article to my dating site last November.

It's a good article by David D and is on 359 other sites according to google.

Google sent me 600 visitors to that page over the last year. Including 34 so far this month.
To duplicate content.

Like others said the duplicate content algo was developed to stop the machine generated adsense spam sites that had thousands of identical pages with only the keyword replaced on each one.

Unique is always going to get more traffic though. That's what Google wants.

I like the redirect them to one site idea. Only one email to watch, less maintenance.

[Colin Evans]

Hi Eric,

If you're worried about any of the pages being ignored because of dupe content, change the text in the title tags, the meta description tag, the H1 tags, the first paragraph and the last paragraph and it's possible to get all three pages on the same results page.

SE's including Google use the data from those tags for the text in their listings but they won't display duplicate listing text - So give them different text to use for the listings...

Another tactic is to go after different keywords for each page in your linking campaigns, then the pages won't be competing with each other.

[Cash Blasters Online]

Change the title slighty and re-arange the wording, the first paragraph should be totaly different,then re-arange the words in other paragraphs to say the same thing.
Also no use to get the same pages ranked on google, if you in the top 5 spots with the same page 3 out 5 times people will get upset and complain.

[Ronnie Nijmeh]

I think my fellow warriors have summed it up rather eloquently already, but put simply... I wouldn't worry too much about it... If you're really concerned, tweak the title tag (i.e. the stuff in <title></title>), the headline, and the first couple paragraphs.

Otherwise, 3 pages of dupe isn't that bad at all.