I came across an established (6+ year) real estate site that ranks at the top of Google for nearly every major Colorado City (Boulder real estate, Parker real estate, and many other cities). What I don’t understand is each page for each city is the exact same including what little actual content there is in the sentences, except for the city name is appropriately changed. Example 1: http://www.cohomefinder.com/Boulder-real-estate-and-homes.htm http://www.cohomefinder.com/Parker-real-estate-and-homes.htm Example 2: http://www.cohomefinder.com/Boulder-listings.htm http://www.cohomefinder.com/Parker-listings.htm A few questions: 1) Is this duplicate content, or am I wrong? 2) With pages for each city +90% duplicated, and no “real†content, just listings, links and few sentences; how do they search so well for every city? 3) How do they get by with no real content besides listings? How are they not being penalized? 4) Home prices dynamically change, and new listings are updated every night through MLS/IDX feed, would this help offset rank even though everything else is duplicated? 5) And, could I do something similar so I can quit writing lengthy "essays" for all 70+ cities just for the sake of having content? Thank you, KaiN
1.) Yes, this is duplicate content. 2.) They've cross-linked their Web site's pages and they have a crapload of links with their choice of anchor text pointing back to their Web site's respective pages. 3.) They're definately trying to manipulate the search index - I'm surprised they haven't been caught yet. Why don't you file a spam report with Google and see what they say? (You can do this from your Google Webmasters Central account.) 4.) If the content is available with JavaScript turned off, it possibly could. I don't see how it would though. 5.) I strongly advise against doing something like that.