How long is an "occasional snippet"

[Kris]

Hi guys, great forum. Hope you don't mind me asking a question .

Re duplicate content, google has this to say:

"you shouldn’t worry about occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) being flagged as duplicate content."

So, how long is a snippet, in google world? 5 words, 5 lines?

What if I took a single sentence from 20 different pages, and arranged them on a single page. Would this be filtered out as duplicate content, do you think?

 

[miked]

So, how long is a snippet, in google world? 5 words, 5 lines?

What if I took a single sentence from 20 different pages, and arranged them on a single page. Would this be filtered out as duplicate content, do you think?

Hey Kris,

This is a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question. As far as I understand, Google doesn't mind you having repeated info on page footers and the like (contact information, disclaimers etc), but when repeated info starts to break into what should be the bedrock unique content of each page then they start to have a problem.

Others may disagree on this, but what you're doing sounds a little like needless duplication. Of course I may be wrong, so could you provide more info so we could make a better judgment?

Mike.

 

[Kris]

thanks for the reply.

The context is a jobs aggregator, so I would be copying the first part of a job description from a variety of sites.

The site has plenty of unique content , but I'm worried that as I increase the aggregation, then duplicate content might outnumber the unique content, hence I want to attenuate the aggregated job descriptions to a safe length.

the question is - how long is safe?

 

[retired_member16]

thanks for the reply.

The context is a jobs aggregator, so I would be copying the first part of a job description from a variety of sites.

The site has plenty of unique content , but I'm worried that as I increase the aggregation, then duplicate content might outnumber the unique content, hence I want to attenuate the aggregated job descriptions to a safe length.

the question is - how long is safe?

When you asked Google, what did they say?

 

[Kris]

I didn't ask google, I read this info on thier webmaster blog.

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

 

[miked]

I didn't ask google, I read this info on thier webmaster blog.

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

Interesting link. Thanks for posting.

My instinct with what you're doing is that it should fall foul of the safeguards Google puts in place, but that doesn't mean that it will. Google's search results seem less pure of late.

Maybe the best thing would be for you to check for similar approaches in your own field or others. Are there other sites taking a similar approach and getting high Google rankings? If so, you're probably alright, for now at least. Of course, such sites may be vulnerable to a future update and may get penalised, so if you're building your site for the long term it may be worth taking a little extra time now to secure quality original content.

Mike.