how much unique content is needed?

[DennisTD]

I wonder if google consider a website with a lot of pages with almost no unique content (only the global template) as spam. If the pages only have a title tag and a h tag med the keyword, would that be a bad idea?

how much unique content is generally needed on a page? :)

[bhartzer]

It won't necessarily be considered spam--the duplicate pages will just be removed from the search engine's index.

Pages are compared to other pages--and the duplicate pages are removed from the index. Pages need to be at least 25 percent different than other pages to remain in the index and not be considered duplicates.

[Marcia]

If the pages only have a title tag and a h tag med the keyword, would that be a bad idea?Bad idea, yes.

There are a lot of sites now being set up with just about all the page content in Javascript - and they're getting hit hard. If you're talking about doing one of those, don't. Put some unique crawlable content on each page, at least a decent size paragraph at the beginning. There has to be a minimum amount of content on pages.

[nuthin]

i recently conducted a test with the hotelclub affiliate program.
i created about 15 or so nicely optimized individual hotel pages and proceeded to use the text that they give to affiliates.
i put up the site on an authority domain name which is 2002 old, pagerank 5, quality backlinks related to tourism etc.
when Google first saw the site/pages, they were placed highly for about a week under the hotel names & location optimized for.
after more evaluation from Google, about a week later they were all filtered out of the results and aren't anywhere near the top.
pretty straight-forward conclusion of Google had no unique content to work with and after about a week or so of evaluating, devalued the site in favour of other higher authoritive sites that had the same/similar content.

[onedodd]

bhartzer

Pages need to be at least 25 percent different than other pages to remain in the index and not be considered duplicates.

So are you saying that if I use a duplicate page checker and when the result come back as says something like:
*ww.site-page#1.com is 55% percentage similar to *ww.site-page#2.com
Then I would be OK but if it said sitepage1 is 85% percentage similar to sitepage2 then I would be in trouble??

This is how the dup checker I use shows their results of webpage comparisons.

[rockcoastmedia]

I know that more content is always better than not enough, as the saying goes, "content is king". But, how do you deal with a client who wants to add only the minimal amount of content on thier site? For example is there a recomended minimum amount of content for the search engines to take a page seriously. For example, does it matter if I have 100 charcaters v. 250?