Avoid Spun Content on Your Websites

Content spinning is an unfortunate necessity in the automotive industry. It’s the practice of taking generic content and attempting to make it unique in the eyes of the search engines by changing portions of the content based upon the target website. For example, there might be a sentence that has all of the same words as hundreds of other websites with the exception of the dealership’s name and address. Technically speaking, this is often enough of a difference to keep the search engines from discrediting the page as duplicate content, but it’s far from a good practice.

Some pages, such as inventory, are pretty much locked into spinning content. There are just too many pages added and removed from inventory on a regular basis to make the content 100% unique, but that’s okay. Google and Bing recognize that inventory pages are like that in the automotive industry as well as other retail industries, so they do not normally penalize as a result. However, the other pages on your website should have unique content on them.

The most annoying component is the homepage content. Even if it’s too much effort for vendors to put unique content on the bulk pages, they should at least use completely unique content on the homepage. Very few do. This is normally an easy fix – just write up fresh content. Unfortunately, it’s normally left up to the dealership to do this. It doesn’t have to be. Dealer Authority believes in writing unique content for all of the static pages of the website. The content on these pages can only be found on the individual dealer’s website. Spinning will not always be an effective method. It’s better to stand out today rather than waiting for the Google and/or Bing hammer to come down.