Here’s the problem.. Been blogging about inventory cars and have about 2 paragraphs per each car. Now I want to take that content and put it in the vehicle comments on Cars.com, Autotrader, etc for each car. (Very easy to do) But I’m really worried about Google seeing it as duplicate content and penalizing my blog site.

I’m not sure what to do, I really want this content used for the vehicle comments on 3rd party sites, but I want all that content to be used as original content for my blog to boost it and keep it up in the SERPS.. (Also re-writing the content isn’t possible, would take way too much time, and not worth giving Cars.com all that for nothing)

Not sure what to do here.

There’s no "penalty" for dupe content.

For example, if you write an article for your site, then publish it on 4 other sites, you get credit for 1 article.

But if you write it for your site, then publish unique versions on 4 other sites, you get credit for 5 articles.

So in your case, each car-for-sale page will NOT be penalized if you post the same content on cars/AT/CL.

I was reading an article which agrees with what you posted. No penalties for dupe content.. And people proving that statement to be true.

Also I don’t get it then, I understand no penalties but will it be harder to rank? If another site is publishing the same content won’t that hurt my site and make my original, one of a kind content, now multiples.. How does Google know which site posts it first to award the credit..

Also this got me thinking, on Cars.com/AutoTrader cars get removed after they are sold. On my blog that content/post stays on there forever and I just add a sold tag. So basically I’d be giving them my content for anywhere from 3-6 months after that they delete it and my blog still has it. So that might work as well for me having the only site with the original content. (I realize it might get copied, but highly unlikely.. It’s about cars..) So in the end, they will remove it sooner or later, and I don’t lose anything.

There’s a bigger penalty for dupe content on the same site. In other words, if you have multiple pages with the same (or very similar) content on your site.

Can you post the link to your article that you were reading?

, Shit. I have to do it that way though.. Here’s what I do. Use a template to change cars make and color and add in the specs. Almost the same sentences for each car.. (I mean cars are very similar all have a/c, power windows etc.) But then under it I have a 100% unique paragraph about the car.. Really hope they don’t pick that up.

Also, read this months ago, didn’t bookmark it.

I had a client in a similar situation. He runs an online store with literally 100s of products, all of which are extremely similar, and his descriptions for each product were almost exactly the same

At least you have a 100% unique paragraph about each item. That’s only going to help.

the more I read lately the more I hear that google doesn’t actually penalize very much for dupe content

You’re not going to get penalized, but you might run the risk of having the other sites outrank you for that content. Google tries to keep their index clean by not showing duplicate content.

But if your site is well established and has been there for awhile, I wouldn’t worry about it so much. Google can mess up every once in awhile, but they’ve been pretty good in recent days.

This isn’t exactly a duplicate content ‘penalty’, but it’s certainly one of the signals that Google uses in its Panda update. This is especially tough for e-commerce sites like you mentioned. The solution of course is to spend money to rewrite all the product descriptions.

Another solution is to add product reviews and add incentives for customers to review each product. Or perhaps even send out an e-mail 7 days after they purchase the product asking for a review.

Here is a link to Google’s guidelines for building a quality site:

If you’re partially copying text and then linking back to the original article you’re fine. It’s close enough for most purposes especially when comment spamming

The big issue is with scrapper sites. If you have duplicate content on your site Google tries to pick the right content but it’s not always great at it. If you’re scrapping content the purpose of duplicate content issues is to attribute credit to the original article. Make sure your article is in the index and even think about tagging your articles on your main site (can’t remember the tags off hand, not canonical tags).

But yeah all the other information is good. Unique reviews are a good thing and worth the effort to pursue