REIMktg

OK - I know this is a real newbie issue.

I have been using the same privacy policy and terms of use pages for several sites and these are very generic and similar to ones all across the net.

Is there something to be done that marks these for not counting as duplicate content - is this even an issue or does Google not worry about the content on these pages just that they exist?

jryan21

I wouldn't worry too much about it, unless you want to get your privacy page ranked.

Drake

I think a lot of people do this. So many that Google could not deduct for this.

I usually save a Word .doc file for each with a generic domain name and service. Then I do a find and replace and change those quickly then paste into a document.

Makes it a little unique and gets some keywords on the page......

Bompa

Exactly!

Furthermore, links to those pages should be nofollow and exclude
those pages in robots.txt. Not due to the mythical dupe issue, but just
because they are useless to SEs.

imo,
Bompa

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REIMktg

Please advise on your reference to "the mythical dupe issue". This has been a concern of mine for some time and really need to learn more about what is or isn't hit by the search engines. Even how real this is. I would really appreciate your input - and others.

thanks.

Moxxy

mythical or not your privacy policy is one page on your site out of how many? If you've only got two pages on your site and that's one of them then worry away... If you've got a few hundred or thousands then why give a fuck about one?

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REIMktg

For clarity I moved on from the specific privacy policy page concern to a concern about dupe content overall.

DanWesson

Spend some time asking Google. You will find differing opinions, but my take is that there is no "penalty." There are only supplemental results. Since G wants to show what it believes to be the most relevant content for any given search, it will exclude everything that it considers duplicate from the SERPs for that search.

Try this:
Go to Google.
Change the search settings to display 100 results.
Search for cat fight or any other phrase you like.
Scroll to the bottom, and click 10.
Keep doing this until you get the message at the bottom of the results that says, "In order to show you the most relevant results...blah, blah, blah...you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Those omitted results are the mythical duplicate content penalty. The page is still there and indexed in G...it just doesn't show up for that particular search.

You could make your content unique in a number of ways including simply mashing it up on the same page with other content. Say you quote an entire article and write a couple of additional paragraphs about it and include a picture, video, or something else...Boom, unique content. You can even use this to shift the keyword focus of the original content.

The above is simply my opinion, but so far I have a couple of sites where this exact mashup method is getting me rankings for longtail phrases where those pages have zero unique content. For the sake of trying to keep these domains in the index, though, I do have a number of completely unique pages with original articles on them.

Someone may come along and post here that everything I've said is bullshit and wrong, but it is just the ramblings of a relative nOOb in this space so it's worth what you paid for it.

teguh123

The problem with nofollow is that the google juice simply evaporate rather than redirected to the remaining links.

The only benefit of nofollow links are to discourage angela from listing your sites for spammers but I see no other uses.

But Bompa always know something I don't.

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