Duplicate content, Original source?
-
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content.
website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source?
If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b?
I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content?
Any help of advice much appreciated.
Kind Regards,
-
Hello: I believe what you might want to do is set up canonical content. This is where you have the same article with two different urls. The canonical content code will give Google the original source and not count it twice.
-
You might find it helpful to use social media when you move the content. Apparently Google can't reliably identify content origins and takes into account social signals and links - some time spent on social bookmarking and posting links to site b on Twitter, Facebook, etc could help shift Google's attention to where you want it to go.
-
Thanks that is really interesting, well i intend to take the content off the original source and hope the other site that keeps it on will get the full value of it.
-
I'm fairly new to the SEO industry so I can't give you an authoritative answer, but I can share some of my experience which seems relevant to your situation.
We have multiple retail websites with varying degrees of overlap of products on sale. One of our oldest domains specialises in fireplaces, but a couple of years ago we set up a general home products site which has a fireplace section featuring the same products as the specialist fireplace site. We wrote unique descriptions for all the fireplaces on new site.
When the time came to re-build the specialist fireplace site we ended up using the same Magento back-end as for our more general site. For the last 18 months both sites have been showing the same content for fireplaces, but with some differences in the content hierarchy. Currently the general site has a slightly higher domain authority and more external links, while the fireplaces site has links from a slightly higher number of domains.
The fireplace site took a nosedive in rankings for a couple of weeks after the re-launch, then not only recovered but gradually achieved higher rankings than before. The general home product site has never ranked as successfully for fireplace keywords, even though it was the originator of the content.
The difference in domain age may have a little to do with the difference in rankings, but other factors are pretty equal. From our experience it seems that where two related sites are sharing content Google prefers to show content from the site most relevant to the search rather than the site which originated the content.
-
I cant re-direct im afraid to say.
-
Okay, I would do it like this:
1. Copy the content from site A to site B
2. 301 the pages from site A to site B
3. Post new content on site AThis will work, unless your content is on the front page of site A. That's all I could think of but I could of course be wrong. Any more experienced Mozzers that know more about this?
-
Yes but tghey are and have to be 2 seperate sites. B needs the content from A - i am going to write unique content to put on A later.
-
Do you have full control over website a? Because you might want to 301 it then.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content issue on Magento platform
We have a lot of duplicate pages (600 urls) on our site (total urls 800) built on the Magento e-commerce platform. We have the same products in a number of different categories that make it easy for people to choose which product suits their needs. If we enable the canonical fix in Magento will it dramatically reduce the number of pages that are indexed. Surely with more pages indexed (even though they are duplicates) we get more search results visibility. I'm new to this particular SEO issue. What do the SEO community have to say on this matter. Do we go ahead with the canonical fix or leave it?
Technical SEO | | PeterDavies0 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Duplicate Content with ADN, DNS and F5 URLs
In my duplicate content report, there are URLs showing as duplicate content. All of the pages work, they do not redirect, and they are used for either IT debugging or as part of a legacy system using a split DNS, QAing the site, etc... They aren't linked (or at least, shouldn't be) on any pages, and I am not seeing them in Search Results, but Moz is picking them up. Should I be worried about duplicate content here and how should I handle them? They are replicates of the current live site, but have different subdomains. We are doing clean up before migrating to a new CMS, so I'm not sure it's worth fixing at this point, or if it is even an issue at all. But should I make sure they are in robots or take any action to address these? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | QAD_ERP0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Duplicate content
I have two page, where the second makes a duplicate content from the first Example:www.mysite.com/mypagewww.mysite.com/mysecondpageIf i insert still making duplicate content?Best regards,Wendel
Technical SEO | | peopleinteractive0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Thin/Duplicate Content
Hi Guys, So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this. Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DPASeo0