How does Google decide what content is "similar" or "duplicate"?

[Eteach_Marketing]

Hello all,

I have a massive duplicate content issue at the moment with a load of old employer detail pages on my site. We have 18,000 pages that look like this:

http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=26626

http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=36986

and Google is classing all of these pages as similar content which may result in a bunch of these pages being de-indexed. Now although they all look rubbish, some of them are ranking on search engines, and looking at the traffic on a couple of these, it's clear that people who find these pages are wanting to find out more information on the school (because everyone seems to click on the local information tab on the page). So I don't want to just get rid of all these pages, I want to add content to them.

But my question is...

If I were to make up say 5 templates of generic content with different fields being replaced with the schools name, location, headteachers name so that they vary with other pages, will this be enough for Google to realise that they are not similar pages and will no longer class them as duplicate pages?

e.g. [School name] is a busy and dynamic school led by [headteachers name] who achieve excellence every year from ofsted. Located in [location], [school name] offers a wide range of experiences both in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities, we encourage all of our pupils to “Aim Higher". We value all our teachers and support staff and work hard to keep [school name]'s reputation to the highest standards.

Something like that...

Anyone know if Google would slap me if I did that across 18,000 pages (with 4 other templates to choose from)?

[GTGshops]

Hi Virginia,

Maybe this whiteboard Friday can help you out.

http://moz.com/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Virginia

That is essentially what we call near duplicates and is the kind of content that can easily be created by pulling fields out of a database and dynamically creating the pages and dropping name, address etc into the placeholders.

Unique content is essentially that, unique content so this approach is probably not going to cut it. You could have certain elements pulled like this such as the address but you need to either remove these duplicate blocks and keep it more simple (like a business directory) and ideally add some unique elements to each page.

These kinds of pages often still rank for very specific queries and also often well thought out landing pages that link to pages like this that have value for users but are not search friendly can be a strategy.

So, assess how well these work as landing pages from search or are they coming in elsewhere? If they come in elsewhere you could no index these pages or block them in robots.txt. Then, target the bigger search terms higher up the tree and create good search landing pages that link to these other pages for users.

This is a real good read to get a better handle on duplicate content types and the relevant strategies:

http://moz.com/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Hope that helps

Marcus

[yournetbiz]

Hi Virginia,

If you take your pages as a whole, code and all, the only slight difference in those pages is the

tag and the sidebar info with school address. The rest of the page code is exactly the same.

If you were to create 5 templates similar to:

[School name] is a busy and dynamic school led by [headteachers name] who achieve excellence every year from ofsted. Located in [location], [school name] offers a wide range of experiences both in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities, we encourage all of our pupils to “Aim Higher". We value all our teachers and support staff and work hard to keep [school name]'s reputation to the highest standards.

If all you are doing is changing the [school name] ans [location] etc, I'm sure Google will still flag these pages as duplicate content.

Unique content is the best way.  If theres not a lot of competition for the school name and the page has enough content about each individual school, head teacher etc, then "templates" might work. You can try it out but I'd say unique content is the best way. It's the nature of the beast with so many pages.

Hope this helps.

Robert