Duplicate Content

The search coupled with google failed me (I patiently wait someone to find my exact question via search to grill me).

I am trying to rank for one set of products, that work on multiple platforms. The ranking is going fine, but I am putting quite a bit of effort into my content, where this person/company just tossed up some rather thin pages. However their site is what I would consider an authority in the niche.

Their website which has been around for years, ranks for the targeted keywords, and the only thing that changes from page to page is the platform name IE: Best whitening toothpaste would be "best american teeth whitening toothpaste, best european whitening toothpaste, etc." the rest of the page is the same. Each page offers 8 types of the best toothpaste , the wording is all the same, same exact products, minimal words.

This would in my mind be considered duplicate content, but they are having zero trouble ranking it. I try to make my page as unique as possible, and this may pull me ahead.

So, what is everyone else's opinion on this being duplicate content?

You said it yourself. They are the authority. Now what are you going to do to take that no1 position?

It can't be duplicate content as it is a product, a generic term.
It's like suggesting using betamax video recorder could only be used by 1 website.

On there site are you saying every page is exactly word for word the same ?
OR are they using like a template and just altering the branded name / product ?

Yeah... the first step in making things unique is having a unique title and meta description because Google doesn't want to have a lot of results that look identical in the SERPs. So if they have been there longer that usually means you have to use a different title than them to rank for the keyword so you don't get filtered out. So there are really two areas... duplicate content on the pages AS WELL AS search results that get filtered for looking too similar to other search results. In a way they may have a flag in their keyword choices which could make it harder for you to compete with the same targeting.

MisterF said:

It can't be duplicate content as it is a product, a generic term.
It's like suggesting using betamax video recorder could only be used by 1 website.

On there site are you saying every page is exactly word for word the same ?
OR are they using like a template and just altering the branded name / product ?

Click to expand...

The site itself is relatively large, (think dedicated ecommerce site on a niche product) maybe medium sized.

The particular pages I mean are the exact same, the only difference is the the audience IE: American Toothpaste, the next page, European Toothpaste, and the corresponding brands single image, everything else is 100% the same, it's really thin content minus all the products, maybe 8 lines of bullet point facts which are also the same.

So, one word is changed, and an image is changed.

Jason Bradbury said:

You said it yourself. They are the authority. Now what are you going to do to take that no1 position?

Click to expand...

Going to throw about 100k links at it of course to a landing page offer. On a serious note, I am already cramming lots of good content and useful information along with everything else that's involved. Them being what I would consider a niche authority I have conducted a fair amount of research into their profile to see if I can overtake them. I figure a quality page with some legitimate content should be a big help among everything else.

Have you had a dig into their backlinks etc ?

MisterF said:

Have you had a dig into their backlinks etc ?

Click to expand...

I have looked into them, those pages mentioned have none....that are crawled, I seem to recall finding some links before (I was guessing a PBN) but looking now I am finding absolutely nothing. Including search for the direct url in google for links besides the original, I may be doing it wrong (or forgot since I did my initial research). I have tried site:google.com, "google.com", link:google.com, somehow the only link I did find was a reddit reply.

The backlinks they do have don't seem to be pointing to these specific pages for the most part but are good backlinks. I am thinking I either need to dig deeper (to verify I did indeed find hidden links before), or these pages are just piggybacking off the domain's authority which I would be surprised about, but not impossible. I find it hard to believe that a specific 7k keyword would go uncontested without a backbone and even more so rank so high. I'll dig deeper and see what I find, since we're now on the hunt