Duplicate Content Vs No Content

[Ryan_Phillips]

Hello!

A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?".

We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description.  We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website.

We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both.  In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions.  I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here.

I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games.  So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO?

Thanks!

[MoosaHemani]

If i strictly stay up to the question then i would go this way...

1. If the content is really awesome for for duplicate but always ad the canonical tag so that you do not die in the SE world.

2. If the content is just tons of words on the page to fill the container... its better to let the container go empty!

[Ryan_Phillips]

Hello Moosa,

Thanks for the advice.  Based on your reply and the one above, I am going to look at implementing a user comment system tonight.  However, I am also interested in any other ideas or general advice about no content vs duplicate content.

Thanks!

[MoosaHemani]

I am not sure the idea will take you out of panda or penguin but my ideas will defiantly going to kill the duplicate content on pages that you are facing at the moment

Add UGC:

It’s difficult for people for businesses to add UGC on their website as many are not comfortable with it but if you are then I would suggest to add UGC on their website that include game reviews, page comments and more...

The Game Talk:

Similar to UGC but here they will be restricted to talk about game cheats, tricks, and tactics only...

The more transparent you can be the more ideas will come in to your mind that will help you get away from duplicate content issue but again I am not sure if this is going to take you out of panda or penguin.

[SEO5Team]

Wordpress is good or you can provide both the options for commenting. The disqus comment plugin for wordpress is great.

[Ryan_Phillips]

Hello,

Thank you for the response.  In regards to the rel tags, we actually bought this website about a month before penguin, so the duplicate content was already there (and we were ranking very well).  However, the point you raised about user comments is a good one, that would give us some more content.

In that case, is the wordpress comment system the way to go, or the Facebook system?

Thanks!

[SEO5Team]

How valuable is the site traffic to you. If you monetize the site traffic well then you should definitely invest in creating unique content for the site. You could have avoided these issues if you had used the rel canonical tag to identify the source of the content. It also matters on how much of the content is duplicated . If it's only a small percentage then it should make that much of a difference.

Based on the info provided and the fact that you have already been hit with google's updates, you should invest in creating unique content. Along with content also create unique meta tags for the pages as well as encourage user interaction on the game pages with reviews /comments.