How much to change to avoid duplicate content?

[ericmccarty]

Working on a site for a dentist.  They have a long list of services that they want us to flesh out with text.  They provided a bullet list of services, we're trying to get 1 to 2 paragraphs of text for each.

Obviously, we're not going to write this off the top of our heads.  We're pulling text from other sources and trying to rework.

The question is, how much rephrasing do we have to do to avoid a duplicate content penalty?  Do we make sure there are changes per paragraph, sentence, or phrase?

Thanks!

Eric

[ericmccarty]

Thanks, Thomas.

[ericmccarty]

Very good, thanks Syed.

[ericmccarty]

Perfect, Ryan. Rand touched on what I was really after with this video.  We don't care if these couple of particular pages are indexed.  We're trying to build a local search presence for this client, so we'll do that with the rest of the site.  I was just worried that the rest of the site would be penalized if there was some dupe content on a page or two.  His example of the children's hospital licensing content applied to our case.

[Thos003]

If it doesn't pass copyscape.com then it won't get past the search engines. It's best to hire a content writer, or have the businesses write their own content. Either way, checking copyscape is always a good idea.

[AdoptionHelp]

Check out this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dealing-with-duplicate-content

It will give you a much more thorough answer than just a percentage of uniqueness. But if you want that kind of answer I mostly hear guesses between 20% - 40% unique content.

[Syed1]

Changes should be on deepest level - words/ phrases. Rephrasing alone is not enough if the words used are exactly same.

Also, to get most bang for SEO campaigns/ traffic, I'd try avoiding having content that is 're-written' from just 1 source. I would use many sources and sort of give a 'new take' on this newly merged comprehensive consolidated content piece.  As I mentioned in another post, this huge content piece with a "new take" leads to your article being considered original and unique, and it also adds to likelihood of it attractive a lot more links than just a re-written piece would.