Duplicate content question

[davej1963]

I have a quick question about duplicate content. I'm developing a web site for a car dealer who is part of a family of 6 car dealerships; 5 have their own web site already in place.

All of these sites have the same About Us, Contact Us, as well as other duplicate content across the entire family of sites. I've read a lot of conflicting stories about duplicate content and I want to know if this is a problem as far as getting rankings. Do I need to get everything re-written, or are they OK the way they are? Thanks in advance.

ps. Any links that explain this in detail would be great.

 

[Linda Buquet]

The duplicate content penalty is somewhat of a myth or misconception and primarily is a negative factor when it comes to scraping and article syndication.

But when innocent content duplication is found typically I think duplicates are just devalued not penalized.

In the case of about us pages, those are not going to be KW rich ranking pages anyway, they will contain company history type content.

In the case of Contact us page, they should never be exactly the same because each location's unique NAP should be on that page as best practice anyway, so all the details would naturally be different.

Here's a reference from Google about dupe content.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"

 

[davej1963]

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Having said all that - unique content is always best. But the money pages for your client, the ones that have auto KWs are going to be unique to each brand and model, so you should be good there.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Dave

My experience matches Linda's. It's OK for boilerplate pages (e.g. Contact) to be duplicates or near-duplicates of each other. It's only if you want to get a given page to rank​ that you need to be concerned about making it unique.