The subject of duplicate content came up again in September, when Cutts took on a question about e-commerce sites that sell products with “ingredients lists” exactly like other sites selling the same product.
Cutts said, “Let’s consider an ingredients list, which is like food, and you’re listing the ingredients in that food and ingredients like, okay, it’s a product that a lot of affiliates have an affiliate feed for, and you’re just going to display that. If you’re listing something that’s vital, so you’ve got ingredients in food or something like that – specifications that are 18 pages long, but are short specifications, that probably wouldn’t get you into too much of an issue. However, if you just have an affiliate feed, and you have the exact same paragraph or two or three of text that everybody else on the web has, that probably would be more problematic.”
“So what’s the difference between them?” he continued. “Well, hopefully an ingredients list, as you’re describing it as far as the number of components or something probably relatively small – hopefully you’ve got a different page from all the other affiliates in the world, and hopefully you have some original content – something that distinguishes you from the fly-by-night sites that just say, ‘Okay, here’s a product. I got the feed and I’m gonna put these two paragraphs of text that everybody else has.’ If that’s the only value add you have then you should ask yourself, ‘Why should my site rank higher than all these hundreds of other sites when they have the exact same content as well?’”