the senario

1)manufacturer has product desciptions and images on its website.
2)wholesale distributer uses the same images and description on its website plus links to the relevant pages on the manufacturers site .

the website are very different but related within the target market.

is this classed as duplicate content and does it bring any penalties or benifits

i represent the manufacturer

Interesting idea

I've used a company called open range for rich text descriptions - I get a huge product database which i can use how i like, so titles, part numbers, descriptions and features all get presented out how i want.

However, may others will be using the same content - so it comes back to your original point.

I feel that several factors need to be considered:
1 - The raw duplicated content
2 - The search term used
3 - The rest of the content on the page
4 - the marketing driving traffic to the page(s)

It is my understanding that if all else is equal, the prize goes to the page that got spidered first.

However, all is not equal. There are different target audiences and varying marketing strategies.

By aiming your marketing (seo, links, ppc, etc and internal sales fluff) and at consumers (rather thab b2b) then the semantics are greatly changed.

I'm sure the search giants like google and yahoo will have algorithms in place to try and direct stockists to wholesalers and consumers to consumer-oriented sites.

This may be done, in part, by the search terms [and hence reflected in your marketing]:

A consumer (your customer) is likely to look for

'item'
'buy item',
'cheap items',
'items near____',
'items with____',
'item review'

Whereas a stockist (you) is likely to look for

'item bulk discount',
'item-manufacturer',
'whole salers of item',
'item pallet delievery'

etc etc

In my experiance, the products sold by the manufacturer or wholesaler come with two different descriptions - a brief one that basically says manufacturer, item name, item part # and price; and a richer one for marketing.

The other thing to note with duplicate content is it depends what keyword is being searched for and if it lies within the duplicated content or some unique content wrapped round it.

If it's in the unique part then you're ok, but it's unlikly to be a profitably search term.

At the end of all that, all i can say is drive your marketing campaign hard, and hope to get a greater authority on the subject matter in the eyes of the SEs

The images used wouldn't count towards any form of duplication.

That makes for a very interesting read there Northie, I like the way you put that.

makes alot of sense.

I have a similar problem with product descriptions that are available to many other people. To get round it, I try and randomise the "Related products" on the same page, which (in my head anyway) does water down the possibility of an identical page elsewhere. I do alright, but some with the same content do better. I think that's more down to the speed at which they get indexed.

To try and get some products indexed first, I start my product listings at the bottom of the file and go up.

Back to allenion's post, I think the backlink from the distributer to the manufacturer's page would greatly help (at least) G to see that his pages are NOT duplicates and are infact the originals. IMO, it's the distributers who would suffer in serps, regardless of who posted what first.