Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?

[MarieHaynes]

On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed.  The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote.  As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office.  The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form.  The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag.

Manually changing the descriptions is not an option.

Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"?

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

Until your site is the KickAss site in your SERPs just add something catchy to the title tag like "Schedule a Tour!" ....... or....... "Free Beer"........ or..... "See it Today!"

[EGOL]

Right... after your site is established this might not be a problem.  I know that your site is relatively new and that it will become the KickAss site in your SERPs.

Don't do obsessive SEO if you can do efficient SEO.

[MarieHaynes]

Thank you!  You've got some great points!

I like the idea of having both the address and the mls in the title and then reversing them for the mls.

For the photos I have the address as my alt tag.  I could certainly add the mls too.

[MarieHaynes]

Oooh.  I like this thought.  Right now for most of these searches we are on the front page but not #1.  However, this is a brand new site and I haven't built any links to it.  So, perhaps, once I've got links and my site is viewed as the "kickass site in the niche" then the duplication will only be a problem for the other realtors?

[btdavis]

The property address is most important and would definitely use that in the title.  You'll find the MLS # to be almost as important.  Why not include both in the title?  Then reverse the order for H1?

I wouldn't be too concerned about duplicate content.  I'm not sure about your area but most areas have an MLS that is syndicating the listings to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites which all use the same description.

In working with real estate sites I also found that "house for sale on {street name}" or "home for sale on {street name}" tended to drive traffic to the the individual property pages.

What are you doing with the property photos?  I'd optimize those as well for the property address and MLS number.

[EGOL]

Go out into the SERPs.  See what's happening.

If you have the kickass site in the niche, your page for this home might rank well.

Other guy's problem, not yours.

[MarieHaynes]

LOL...this is why I was asking the question.  Is there anything I can do to help other than manually changing the descriptions?

[BradBorst]

That's even worse.

[SteveOllington]

Whoah! You definitely don't want that...

[MarieHaynes]

Oh...I may have worded my question incorrectly!  The content is not duplicated across my site.  Rather, the home description is the exact same content as on several other realtors' sites.

[BradBorst]

You can always just have the content indexable on one page and add it to an image for all the other pages.

[MarieHaynes]

I'd love to discuss this...in fact, I'm going to start a new discussion on it!

[SteveOllington]

It's not that, it's just that it's potentially damaging (sorry, I'm quoting that Market Motive seminar again... been doing that a lot lately lol) to have an H1 and title tag that match.

[MarieHaynes]

Interesting idea.  We do get hits because of the content in the description though.  for example, we get a lot of hits for "In law suite".

[SteveOllington]

Good idea, or have it in an iframe!

[BradBorst]

Is it possible for you to put that listing content in an image?  This would allow you to continue using indentical content on all pages.  However, the content in the image would not be searchable.  If you are just using this content for the user experience, that's fine.  If you want it indexed to add quality to the page, you will instead want to make each listing unique.

[MarieHaynes]

I guess it makes sense to have a different h1.  What do you think would be most effective?  I think the title should be the house address as this is most likely to be searched.  Perhaps the H1 could be "MLS #123456"?

[SteveOllington]

I don't know the answer to the actual question but I do know that you should never have the title and h1 match... or have dupe meta descriptions but you already know that