Duplicate Content?

[waynekolenchuk]

My client is a manufacturers representative for highly technical controls. The manufacturers do not sell their products directly, relying on manufacturers reps to sell and service them. Most but not all of them publish their specs on their sites, usually in PDF only.

As a service to our customers and with permission of the manufacturers we publish the manufacturers specs on our site for our customers in HTML with images and downloadable PDF's — this constitutes our catalogue. The pages are lengthy and technical, and are pretty much the opposite of thin content.

The URLS for these (technical) queries rank well,  so Google doesn't seem to mind. Does this constitute duplicate content and can we be penalized for it?

[Prospector-Plastics]

I like Frederico's response and agree with it. If you are providing additional content and value (which is good for the site visitor), you are fine. We actually do a very similar thing with highly technical data and the only time we ran into duplicate content issues was when we accidentally had three pages about the same product because it applied to three different categories. To fix the issue, we created a new product page listing all three categories on the page itself, and applied canonical tags from the other three duplicate pages to the new page.

[waynekolenchuk]

That's pretty much what I thought. After being steady for a couple of years, traffic from organic search has started to fluctuate within the last month or so from day to day and I wondered if we were being penalized.

[FedeEinhorn]

No, Google is smart enough to determine which content shouldn't be duplicated and what content is most likely to be the same in all sites (exactly your situation).

As a side note, if you are adding the content in HTML, plus providing an extra value, you will probably rank higher than those that just display the product specs as a downloadable PDF.