How do you fight duplicate content problem?

Whenever a webmaster starts talking about duplicate content issues, the very next word that drops in is – “Google” (can you think of ?duplicate content issue’, PageRank, ?paid link’ and ?Google’ in separation! Lol… would you like to add some more tags!).

And lately there had been lots of talk on duplicate content issue at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. You can also find lots of other pages issued by Google on the same topic.

Google says that it always thinks from a visitor’s perspective. Certainly – visitors are the most integral part of their business model and who sells information more than Google!

I agree at one point with Google that there is ideally no need to use duplicate content within a website – it does not help your visitors at all and there is no need to distribute concentration in different pages to serve the same purpose. If someone has done proper keyword analysis before planning the site structure, there should not be any problem in keyword or content distribution. And you can easily write different footer text (a common SEO trick) to optimize all pages of a website.

However, this is not so simple when you are operating a product based website.

We often find that a range of products have similar features with minor differences. Or maybe, the same product is being manufactured by different companies. Thus while writing about them you cannot be 100% unique – what do you do in such a situation?

This is a bigger problem for those who are not manufacturers of the product and the manufacturers have their own websites to sell it directly. For example, if you are selling something like an iPod in your website, it is very difficult for you to be different from what is already there in other websites or there in Apple’s own website. You job becomes more tough in proportion to the products’ popularity. And as a seller, you cannot afford to link to those main websites for more information as they are selling the product in their website too. Who want to loose a hard-earned prospective customer!

Take a look at websites like eBay. They are full of duplicate content for the same reason.

How do you overcome such problems? Tell us your stories: