No matter how hard you try to offer 100% unique content, you can’t.
Duplicate content is among the top 5 SEO issues that sites face especially now Google has put its Panda Update into play.
Duplicate Content
There are several ways that duplicate content can cause your site to be viewed as a low-quality site by the Panda algorithm.
The first is when a site has a large amount of content that is copied from other sources on the web. Let’s say that you have a blog on your site and you populate that blog with articles that are taken from other sources. Google is pretty good at figuring out that you are not the creator of this content. If the algorithm can see that a large portion of your site is made up of content that exists on other sites then this can cause Panda to look at you unfavorably.
You can also run into problems with duplicated content on your own site.
One example would be for a site that has a large number of products for sale. Perhaps each product has a separate page for each color variation and size. But, all of these pages are essentially the same. If one product comes in 20 different colors and each of those come in 6 different sizes, then that means that you have 120 pages for the same product, all of which are almost identical. Now, imagine that you sell 4,000 products. This means that you’ve got almost half a million pages in the Google index when really 4,000 pages would suffice. In this type of situation, the fix for this problem is to use something called a canonical tag.
Thin Content
A “thin” page is a page that adds little or no value to someone who is reading it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a page has to be a certain number of words, but quite often, pages with very few words are not super-helpful. If you have a large number of pages on your site that contain just one or two sentences and those pages are all included in the Google index, then the Panda algorithm may determine that the majority of your indexed pages are of low quality.
Having the odd thin page is not going to cause you to run into Panda problems. But, if a big enough portion of your site contains pages that are not helpful to users, then that is not good.
