So I decided to take a short-cut in building my recipe website and bought a database containing a few thousand recipes. I culled out the ones that were relevant to my site and built my site around them. Unfortunately, I don't show up in the SERP for my keyword but I do get a little traffic from google on my long tail keywords. I've acquired some unique recipes and have been adding them to my site. My question is, should I remove the old recipes (duplicate content) and replace it with the new unique recipes, or can I just add the new unique recipes and keep the old? What is the best approach in getting out of the duplicate content penalty?
I would say keep the old. Even if you dont rank very well, you said it yourself, you are getting some traffic. But, do not forget to build constant new content, this will help alot.
Well as the 2nd poster said, you wont rank well, sometimes the best way get traffic is posting new content, it makes you more unique.
So keeping the old will not negatively impact the site? I guess what I'm trying to ask is will keeping the old leave the site stained as a duplicate content site or will the new content erase that stain while leaving the old duplicate content available? I'm looking to move up in the ranks for my keyword and not just for the new long tail keywords the new recipes will bring.
Keeping the old recipes shouldn't harm the site but specific pages (the old ones) won't. Add new recipes and do what you can to change the titles and meta descriptions which might help. I bought a site script a bit like yours - database-driven with commonly available data. To avoid dupliate problems I changed the PHP to shuffle things around on the page and display different data in titles and so on.
Why don't you try adding comments to the old recipes, or even rewording them a bit. This will help the search engines see them as unique content, IMO.
I've done a bit of that but didn't know if it would be fruitful and it takes a good bit of time. I guess it all leads back to what I was originally wanting to know: Will my site always suffer from a duplicate content penalty? For the looks of the replies it looks like I should be able to do something about it.
If I were you, I would still go ahead and use it anyway. I wouldn't put the contents exactly as per the original but maybe work out a little and insert some suggestions and points for improvement in the recipe so that it turns out unique. I hope you get what I mean.
Try to add some new content without removing the old one, and try to show it together. A trick to show some duplicate content, not seeing as duplicate by google is to add much new content to same page.
I would advise you remove the duplicate content and replace it then your page will be indexed better, however if your pages are cached then Google will consider it
I suggest you rewrite all the duplicate recipes, if that is not possible, then remove the duplicate recipes.
It could be difficult to rewrite or modify the old recipes if there are several thousand. If you can't do simple changes on things like titles, I'd suggest leaving the old recipes alone and concentrate on new ones. The new ones may turn up better in Google searches and attract visitors, the old ones will help keep visitors who search for recips while already on your site.
Tricky situation you have gotten into. It was a mistake to use the database containing more than thousand recipes that are most likely already in the google index. So you have picked up a duplicate penalty. What to do? The safest thing to do is start from scratch buying a new domain. If you absolutely want to use your old domain, I suggest deleting the old recipes and re-build your site with new unique content, but you can't know for sure when google will lift you penalty.
Yea surely would be a great problem if you try to update your website with the duplicate content because google simply kills those pages having the duplicate content. so don't every to try to post the copied articles...
Great suggestion, that exactly what I was going to suggest.. Add some comments or testimonial from people that have prepared and taste the recipes, this way the content of the page will became more unique...