[thelist] While We Are on the Topic of SEO

[Bob Meetin]

I'm going to run into the duplicate content issue with a site I'm 
customizing from a service package.  There are a number of companies 
that sell out of the box, awkwardly customizable content packages.  My 
client, tax service guy, chose to use one of these because they provide 
a ton of boxed content for the site.  He did not want to have to 
maintain this stuff. 

Before jumping in all the way, I communicated with the company president 
about duplicate content;  he admitted that it was a problem as there are 
around 400 similar installations around the country.  He said that the 
content would not be indexed.  I also checked with an SEO acquantance 
who sort of corroborated the problem statement.

I don't know that the duplicate content will cause any actual damage vs 
simply not getting the pages indexed.  If someone can say different I'd 
like to hear it - but I feel (reasonably) confident that I can customize 
the primary content pages adequately that at least those pages will get 
indexed fine.

Regarding these services (services?) that offer content such as this, 
IMHO they are gangly to work with at best.  It will take me perhaps 
triple time to clean up a lot of surplus table stuff that they use to 
make thir content fit their inhouse templates.  The particular service 
we went with has high customer service ratings and advertises the 
service as one that the business owner could do him/herself - I just 
don't think so - I suspect that once someone has attempted to do it 
themselves, that they would get frustrated and of course decide to spend 
the extra nickel and have the service develop the site.

Some of these services use framed sites - this one uses tables.  I did 
some pre-investigation with several of the live/demo framed sites - and 
for the most part, they were "totally" invisible.  Aside from finding 
results through either yellow pages directory or maybe a regional 
listing of tax preparers, unique content on the home page wasn't to be 
found. 

I suspect that a lot of businesses un-knowingly jump into using these 
services without understanding the consequences or even knowing the 
right questions to ask.  Our job is to educate.

-Bob

Stuart Young wrote:

>On 20/06/06, Asif Suria <asifsuria at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Is the duplicate content penalty a myth or a fact?
>>
>>cheers
>>
>>
>>    
>>