You are absolutely right, it does happen and most of the time when it happens, it’s because that’s not original content. So, if you get an affiliate feed and it might have images, it might not have images, and you have the same content on your page, your e-commerce product page as 400 other sites, it’s hard to distinguish yourself.
You have to ask ‘Where is my value add, what does my affiliate site or my site that doesn’t have original content add compared to these other hundreds of sites’.
Whenever possible, I urge you to try to have original content, try to have a really unique value add. Don’t just take an affiliate feed, create a site that is fly by night and now there’s no reason why anybody wants to stumble on your site.
Typically, it’s best if you can find some way to have some kind of unique angle and not just the exact same stuff that everybody else has on their webpage, as well.
Related posts:
- Hi Matt, what are your opinions on optimizing an Ecommerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich in content?
- A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency, (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? What can be done?
- Are different sites treated differently? E.G. are blogs treated differently than e-commerce sites? Does Google attempt to figure out the context of a site or are all websites equal?
- If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?
- Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues? For example, my site is www.example.com and now when you add digg.com before my site’s address (digg.com/example.com), it is showing a page from Digg.com with my content (exactly the same).
