Duplicate content – Shingles

Boogybonbon.com has posted a very interesting article on duplicate content. In this case the reference to Shingles is a block of text that has been directly copied from one site to another. In some cases people use shingles and simply replace keywords that they feel are more appropriate for the page that they are placing it on.

There is a general theory that if you add unique content around this Shingle you can make the content seems more worth while. This article points out that this is not the case and if you wish to use a Shingle, you need to edit the Shingle significantly.

I completely agree with this data and furthermore have had successful examples of this with one of my Billiard sites. When I first launched my Billiard site I would take the content from the manufacturer and place it on my site. Having almost no positive SEO benefits, I attempted to add additional content to the pages which had a nominal lift. When I completely re-wrote each product they sky rocketed up in the rankings. Obviously I used the manufactures specs within my content since it wouldn’t make sense to use other incorrect data.

Interesting read, added it to my home page reader.