Duplicate content. Competing for rank.

[Bee159]

Scenario:

An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy.

Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google?

Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content?

Thank you.

[mgreeves]

Q1: Easier said than done, but definitely worth the time to rewrite the "chunks," especially if they are descriptions. I can see if it's something like safety information, where you'd actually want it to be known it's coming from a trusted source. But, descriptions should be rewritable. If not, you probably don't want to pass the copy off as your own, so best to keep it separate and say something like "site XYZ has this to say..."

Also, if it can't be rewritten, gauge how much content is unique to each page, and consider what else can be written about the cars to help balance out the ratio of unique to copied content.

Q2: Make sure the dealer's website has self-referencing canonicals if that's the original source of the information.

[benesmartin]

Q2: If the "popular car listing website" has better domain authority, domain age etc. than the "dealer's website", then it could be an issue because Google sees the other website as more authoritative. However, date of publication is also important so if you posted it first on your website then there should be a less risk. Anyway, I'd recommend to change the text a bit for every website if possible. Or you can add some more multimedia content to the main page to make it different and more preferred.