Ok, so we have a music community where new bands and artists sign up, they add their pic, can upload videos, their location, their music genre, of course add their music, all sorts of stuff to personalize their band profile page. Well, we were hit pretty hard by Panda 3.5 back in April. I didn't really have an answer for this for a while.... but as it turns out, MOST of our artists/bands were copy/pasting Bios from their others sites into their profile upon signup. So, they'd have like this 750 word Bio of their band that they'd already copied to their personal site, their Facebook, their MySpace, etc etc. and then just plop it in their brand new profile page on our site, leaving us with a low-quality, copied page, no doubt warranting? a Panda penalty. My question is this.... Can anyone think of a creative way to have some sort of Bio section for one of these profile pages that would push/nudge/guide them to make unique content, as opposed to making it easy for them to copy/paste a large amount of pre-written text from elsewhere? I thought a good idea may be to, instead of having a one big input field that says "BIO" with lots of blank space, break it up into multiple questions, like "Who were your influences?", "What are your biggest accomplishments to date?", etc. Has anyone else had to deal with anything like this? Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Before finishing your entire post what popped into my head was exactly as you described at the end. Ask specific questions to form the bio. Read some of the bios you currently have and see what kind of questions could get the majority of what the band/artist wants to put in the bio. You may end up having 10+ questions, but it will force the band/artist to provide unique answers instead of a generic profile they have used many times. Thats about the only way to stop them copying and pasting. No one wants to write several different 750 word bios for each site. It's just not logical to try and force them to do that. So instead go with your original instinct, to break the bio section down into interview style questions. Not only will this be more engaging for the reader, it's probably going to be unique to your site which is a great thing. Good luck.
Thanks for the reply. Yea, I guess that seems to be the best way to go. I just didn't want to overwhelm them in the signup process with like 18 fields and have them abandon altogether. But yea, I hear you about it making the site more unique. I just wonder what others have done in a similar situation. Similarly, I had tried to copy/paste a question I had asked in the Google Webmaster Forums into the SEO Chat Forum and noticed that it did not go through. I think they have some sort of dupe content filter that blocks the copied content from going live to everyone else. So... that is one way to fight against people copy/pasting content. Has anyone heard of this type of software? Thansk