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.