Will duplicate content supplied from a hotel provider damage my website, or simply just the pages that it appears on?

[mjk26]

Hi,

I currently have a lot of hotel listings pages with little or no content, as I'm scared that if I place duplicate hotel descriptions on the pages then Google will stop ranking the page.  I've found that having descriptions of some kind do help conversion significantly, so I'm considering generating unique hotel descriptions on each main page (page 1 in each set of listings) - these are the pages that Google indexes.  On subsequent pages (page 2, page 3 etc.) I'm thinking about resorting to displaying the duplicate affiliate content hotel descriptions - these pages can be crawled but are set to noindex.  My  question is, do you think this is likely to have an effect on my website in the rankings, and as a result push my primary pages (that contain 100% unique content) down in SERPs.

Thanks

Mike

[KaneJamison]

Hi there,

Digging up an old question I was asked to respond to.

In short - if you're writing unique descriptions on the indexed pages, then those are fine. The non-indexed pages don't matter in regards to duplicate content, though I'm unclear why you would need page 2 or 3 for a single hotel.

[mjk26]

mmm, I'm not sure I fully agree with you - in certain circumstances thats the case, but if duplicate content is only shown on pages that are not indexed then that shoudn't really have any influence on the results at all, should it?  In my case, the duplicate content would only be there to enhance the user's experience, not to try to get an unfair advantage in SERPs.

[oneticsoft]

Dublicate content means for search engines that you are trying to influence the results with repetitive content , when you'll solve the problem with dublicates see for yourself the results.

[mjk26]

Hi Cocarcea,

mmm so are you saying that Google will penalise my entire website just because it finds duplicate content on non indexed pages?  I would have thought thats a bit harsh, since I'm making sure that the pages I allow in the index have good quality, unique content, while the duplicate content is only left in other pages to aid the user.  I'm not keen on using rel=nofollow - the pages contain plenty of links to internal pages on my site, and I want to encourage Google to find those pages.

Thanks

Mike

[oneticsoft]

you can make descriptions and content for main pages and other pages make rel no follow :), and the dublicate pages will not stop ranking but that is not a good ideea you will be penalised in google's position, read google webmaster begginer's guide, and try to put on pages fresh and quality content for users not for search engines.