What happens when content on your website (and blog) is an exact match to multiple sites?

[MorganPorter]

In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example:

http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/

http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/

http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/

If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place.

So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?

[MorganPorter]

Thanks to everyone who commented on this!

Meta, your answer seems to have valid points on different levels. I appreciate the insight!

[Chris.Menke]

Hey Morgan, I've seen this often with professional sites of all sorts. The vendor is selling a content service but the buyer is either not aware that the same content is being sold to all their clients, or not aware that it makes a difference.  Often, the buyer is on the hook for the service for a year or so.

Here's the thing: Competing in the search engines is about differentiating your website and getting people to engage with your content--and it's hard to do either of those things with content that's common to hundreds or thousands of other sites.  In answer to your question, the duplication doesn't necessarily make you site irrelevant, it just doesn't give search engines a reason to rank it higher than the next dentist.

What that content does do is provide your local visitors with a feeling that your practice is up to date with news and technology and that can be an advantage over a site that lacks any updated content--you'll just have to drum up those visitors from somewhere other that organic search.

One of those other places is local search.  With or without dupe content, you can still focus on making your local results stronger and it can be argued that that's better than showing up in the organic results for many dentists.

[EGOL]

These dentists seem to be satisfied with pedestrian content on a generic website.  They probably rank OK in local search if they are competing in Soldotna or Bugtussle and have someone who knows how to work local.

If they face stiffer competition, especially in organic SERPs, then they will probably not compete very well.

If I was a dentist I would want my own content and photos on the site.... just because.

[DougRoberts]

If all these dentist have exactly the same content - how is a prospective customer going to decide which one is best?

"We're just like the next guy" isn't a Unique Value Proposition and isn't going to help your business stand apart from the crowd.

Unique content is harder, but it's so much better than generic "insert your practice name here" boiler plate content.

[MorganPorter]

Thanks, James!

Anyone else have any thoughts on this type of thing?

[jws8118]

It may not be getting them a manual penalty but it's definitely not helping them in the long term either.  Creating unique and useful content is the only way to keep gaining organic search traffic in the long run.