Duplicate Content

[Djfreema]

Hi,

At the moment I have duplicate content on some of pages mainly due to me having a few pages which have the template but no unique text. Nothing that cant be sorted with a bit of work.

I have put a few of my pages into this tool to check the % of duplicate content http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php.

Does anyone have any idea of a safe %? Obviously it is imporatnt to keep this as low as possible but it would be good to know a specific % or a basic guideline.

Thanks,

Darrell

[mattk]

I ran a couple of pages through that tool from a well known high street clothing retailer and the pages came out at 96% similar.

I think by definition an e-commerce site is going to have very similar pages, as the only thing differing on a product page will be a title, description and image, the rest of the page will be effectively a template.

Personally I wouldn't get too hung up on results from a tool like this. Yes, Google does have a duplicate content filter, but I think it's more for people who duplicate content on multiple sites in an attempt to "spam" the SERPs.

[Djfreema]

Mattk - I agree with you that e-commerce sites are always going to have a high % in a tool like this due to the standard template of the site.

Once I add products to my categories the it goes down to about 75%. However for some of my competitors it goes down to about 25%.

[mattk]

This of course is only my opinion, but I wouldn't worry too much about the duplicate content filter. If my pages were seriously lagging in the SERPs are plenty of things I could do before worrying about duplicate content.