I recently heard someone say that duplicate content will get your site banned from Google. It simply isn’t so. If it were, every single ILS would have been out of business years ago.

            Most larger property management companies are interested in maintaining a consistent message and rely on products like Lead2Lease, ILS Portal, Dynamic Lead Solutions or other lead management and tracking solutions to automate feeds to ILSs, craigslist and other online marketing vehicles. Among other things, this results in the same community description text being in hundreds of places on the web.

            Let’s look at 1500 Locust as an example, which is managed by The Bozzuto Group, one of the top 10 multifamily developers in 2011 and one of the largest property management companies in the East. Its community description is 199 words long. According to Google’ Webmaster Tools, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. ” I think most people would agree 199 words is a substantive length.  Doing a Google search for a snippet of the text reveals they are sending this description to (or in some cases, it has been unknowingly syndicated to or scraped by) ForRent.com, Orbitz.com, 4WallsInPhilly.com, BridgeStreet.com, Oodle.com, ApartmentRatings.com, YouTube.com, RealEstate.com and olx.com.  Clicking through to the second page reveals another ten results. After looking at the 5th pages, I got bored. I’m sure if I continued clicking I’d see Google has omitted some results, but I rarely click beyond the first pages when I’m searching anyway.

            In a perfect world is it ideal that all ILSs have the same content? Not really, but in the fact is that duplicate content has not gotten any of the ILS sites banned, let alone the individual pages. And one of the realities in our imperfect world is it’s unrealistic for ILS customers to produce unique text for each site.

            And at least in our case, while it may not be the best case scenario, it’s yielding good enough results. Our 1500 Locust listing is a search engine magnet. According to Google Analytics, that page had  233 entrances (and only 58 bounces). 

            Duplicate content does not appear to be hurting 4 Walls. How is it affecting your site traffic?