I know of an industrial company whos website was banned from Google because of a hacker who’d been hosting spam on their domain. Because the re-inclusion at process can take upwards of several months, I was of course surprised to see one of their keywords getting results on Google. (I know full well none of their pages are indexed.) A click on the result brought me to their distributors website. Evidently this distributor has several sections of their website dedicated to promoting ‘mini versions’ of their supplier’s sites, which, while a fine marketing move, raises HUGE duplicate content issues that can adversly affect rankings.

The innterconnectiveity between businesses and brands within the industrial marketplace presents a unique scenario as it relates to duplicate content and advertising online. To save your rankings, here are a few things for industrial companies to watch out for:

1. Re-Sellers

For websites who distribute well known brands, pay special care to your website copy and online marketing collateral. While it can be tempting to follow a model that works, if your content is identified by the search engines as ‘closely similar, your site will be less favored, and at worst, your pages ignored. Put a unique spin on the products you sell.

2. OEMS & Distributors

For distributors who feature information about their manufacturers, if that information first appeared on the manufacturer’s website, your pages could be penalized. Manufacturers, why not leverage the opportunity to distibute unique content while widening your visibility online? By supplying seperate web copy to your partners, you safeguard your pages, heighten your ’status’ in the search engines ( by virtue of relationship with a topically simliar website,) and create new opportunties for incoming links.