My vacation rental listed here, there and everywhere… part 2

This post is to continue our discussion from part 1 of “My vacation rental listed here, there and everywhere…”

Lets answer following questions:

• can I copy / paste information or description from my rental from my site to portals?
• will my site get penalized if information on my website is the same as on vacation rental portals
• how can I improve my chances in search engine.

Can I copy / paste information or description from my rental from my site to portals?

Yes, you can copy and paste information from your website and across vacation rental portals. This will not benefit your own vacation rental site in any way. Google will most likely feel that one of the older portals where your identical description appears will be more trustful source for this content.

The best approach will be - ALWAYS HAVE A UNIQUE CONTENT ON YOUR OWN VACATION RENTAL SITE.

It doesn’t take a very long time to re-write your content and make it unique for portals, we will talk about it later. We will also touch up on how long the content should be and how it should be (or shouldn’t be written).

So if you copied any content from your own website, take this first step to optimizing your own vacation rental website - rewrite your content on every page where you think you had some copying done.

Will my site get penalized if information on my website is the same as on vacation rental portals?

No, your site won’t be penalized. As we talked before, Google realize that portal site is a collection of ads. Google doesn’t punish sites for duplicates in advertising. However, your site will not benefit from it in any way as explained above.

How can I improve my chances in search engine?

This is a long road ahead of you :). But if you start with few simple things now, you will see results by next Google update and you will see more inquiries in the future too.

Check your vacation home website - for any duplicated content you have on portals where you advertise. It usually happens when you create a listing in vacation rental portal - you will just copy a part of your website description and then paste it to the listing details. Rewrite the content on your vacation rental site and never use itanywhere on Internet. This will help your vacation rental site to advance in search engine game.

Check all titles and descriptions on all vacation rental portals you advertise.

1. Make a list of all portals where you market your vacation home.
2. Put side by side descriptions and titles.
3. Mark identical descriptions and / or titles of your vacation rental
4. Make 1 change every day. If you only work on 1 portal per day, you will be done within 1 week as average vacation rental owner is listed on 5-7 vacation homes portals.
5. Make it a rule - never reuse any content even if you are in rush to complete a listing.

This will help your vacation rental listing on the portal to advance in search engine game.

Happy booking!

Google and duplicate content

Now I want to step back and talk about duplicate content in Google. We will analyze other search engines approaches shortly as well.

I want to start with Google as this is an engine who is doing more then other engines in terms of analyzing, capturing and dealing with duplicate content. Also as majority of Internet users will use google to search for your vacation home, this will be just a natural step to take.

What is considered by Google as a duplicate content?

Google states it very clearly in these 2 articles that I will sum up and we later apply it to our vacation rental industry:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html (December 2006)

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.html (June 2007)

1.
Here is what Google defines as a duplicate content. “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

2.
Google does say they know that a lot of duplicate content is not intentional. However, they acknowledge that they are after a duplicate content created “in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.”

3.
Translation of the very same page is not a duplicate content. Snippets and quotes are not duplicate content.

4.
Google don’t penalize in most cases for the duplicate content. They concentrate on filtering, not on page rank adjustments. In rare cases when duplicate content was created intentionally to misled searched, site will get penalized.

5.
Here’s what as of today Google will recognize as an “OK” duplicate content (with a way to show to search engine they are ok):
- Printer version for the same item.
- Similar product or services listings on different sites that you own that overlap in content.
- Reusing content from another source with full author credits.
- Good reason for duplicate content, or intentional mistake resulted in duplicate content (wonder how this can be proven).

6.
Google offer different suggestions on how to deal with duplicate content.