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We know that content of each page should be unique and useful for users.

Google will penalize thin websites with low quality content and duplicate content.

What I want to know is what is the exact meaning of "Duplicate Content" & "Low Quality Content".

Assume that we have a website with 10,000 pages and some parts of each page is repetitive in the layout in all of the pages.

Look at this example :

enter image description here

Does Google count repetitive content of the layout of pages as "Duplicate Content" ?

Is this page a "Low Quality" page because the unique part is lower than 300 words ?

When somebody searches a keyword including some of words that are in the layout words, does Google show them to the user ?

Is "Ratio" of unique/repetitive content important ? if yes, how much it should be ?

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  • Can you be a bit more specific as to what 100 words here (repetitive in layout) actually is? I am not exactly sure how to answer your question without knowing what you are doing in these sections.
    – closetnoc
    Mar 25, 2014 at 17:12
  • @closetnoc these are tag pages that each one lists some article. unique section is the list of relative articles and repetitive sections are header, right navigation menu and some description about the site. the problem is some of tags have few articles (less than 3 article) and so the unique section will be lower than 300 words.
    – Milad Safaei
    Mar 25, 2014 at 21:01
  • Have a look at the official Google Webmaster Help Youtube channel - the link contains the answers you seek :)
    – Marek Andreansky
    Mar 25, 2014 at 22:35
  • @marek-andreansky Thanks for useful link, but may you give a clear answer to this question ?
    – Milad Safaei
    Mar 26, 2014 at 13:50
  • Added a more comprehensive answer - hope it helps.
    – Marek Andreansky
    Mar 28, 2014 at 21:10

2 Answers 2

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Your biggest issue here are the 80 words: how relevant are they?

I highly doubt you'll get a conclusive answer on a ratio, so I'm just gonna share my experience.

If you think about headers, menus, footers and all of that, most websites are pretty repetitive.

I have been very successful in one website for example, where the only different content in many pages is an h1 tag, an h2 tag, a title, a description tag, a picture, with its alt and title tags and a small description of the picture. In words, this is about 10-15.

Now, this does not mean you are gonna be successful or not, it'll highly depend on what you're doing with these pages and how relevant the content is to your site and others.

On the website I mentioned for example, these pages are about 60% of the website, and bring about 40% of traffic.

Now, I am in no way saying that you should create duplicate pages as that would of course not be helpful since they wouldn't be indexed.

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  • Are you saying to intentionally engage in duplicate content?
    – closetnoc
    Mar 25, 2014 at 18:15
  • @closetnoc Of course not, where did you get that idea from?
    – riseagainst
    Mar 25, 2014 at 18:24
  • With respect of course. I have been very successful in one website for example, where the only different content in many pages is an h1 tag, an h2 tag, a title, a description tag, a picture, with its alt and title tags and a small description of the picture. In words, this is about 10-15. Sounds like duplicate content when I read it. I was not sure if that was what you meant. I am not accusing you of anything. In fact, I was sure that is not what you meant. I just found your answer unclear on this point. Again, with respect.
    – closetnoc
    Mar 25, 2014 at 18:34
  • @closetnoc Sure, not a problem. =] In my case, it was necessary to display custom item variations. While these pages are similar, if they were considered duplicate, there would be no reason to have them whatsoever. I just wanted to share my experience, that if he does indeed need pages that are that similar, that they can still be indexed and not considered duplicate. I'll update that part of the answer.
    – riseagainst
    Mar 25, 2014 at 18:40
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    @MiladSafaei It's really impossible for anyone to state how Google would view your specific site, except for Google. Given its size, an A/B test to confirm if Google indexes individual pages that might be questionable seems warranted.
    – dan ♦
    Mar 25, 2014 at 23:53
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Google usually knows which content is unique, which is repetitive and behaves according to that.

I would add a descriptive meta title + meta description that will tell a lot about your content to people that are searching for it. The meta data has to be written in accordance with the goal of each specific page (sell product, tell a story, get feedback).

You can also use the Google data highlighter tool. I am running an eshop and I have used it to mark the price, short description and main product image. If you're running a blog you can highlight articles. Have a look at the Google highlighter help page.

It does not really matter how much unique text you have, it's about the value that it gives to your visitors. If you have lots of images and little text you should be fine if you name your images and alt tags correctly (use only "-" as a word divider, empty spaces are bad for SEO).

To sum it up:

  1. Use meta description and meta title
  2. Mark your content with Google highlighter in Webmaster tools
  3. Use proper image names with alt description
  4. Have one goal per page, if more pages have exactly the same goal then merge them!
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