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
-
Query Strings causing Duplicate Content
I am working with a client that has multiple locations across the nation, and they recently merged all of the location sites into one site. To allow the lead capture forms to pre-populate the locations, they are using the query string /?location=cityname on every page. EXAMPLE - www.example.com/product www.example.com/product/?location=nashville www.example.com/product/?location=chicago There are thirty locations across the nation, so, every page x 30 is being flagged as duplicate content... at least in the crawl through MOZ. Does using that query string actually cause a duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | Rooted1 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
Taking descriptions from Manufacturer sites and Duplicate content
We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley1 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Is there ever legitimate near duplicate content?
Hey guys, I’ve been reading the blogs and really appreciate all the great feedback. It’s nice to see how supportive this community is to each other. I’ve got a question about near duplicate content. I’ve read a bunch of great post regarding what is duplicate content and how to fix it. However, I’m looking at a scenario that is a little different from what I’ve read about. I’m not sure if we’d get penalized by Google or not. We are working with a group of small insurance agencies that have combined some of their back office work, and work together to sell the same products, but for the most part act as what they are, independent agencies. So we now have 25 different little companies, in 25 different cities spread across the southeast, all selling the same thing. Each agency has their own URL, each has their own Google local places registration, their own backlinks to their local chambers, own contact us and staff pages, etc. However, we have created landing pages for each product line, with the hopes of attracting local searches. While we vary each landing page a little per agency (the auto insurance page in CA talks about driving down the 101, while the auto insurance page in Georgia says welcome to the peach state) probably 75% of the land page content is the same from agency to agency. There is only so much you can say about specific lines of insurance. They have slightly different titles, slightly different headers, but the bulk of the page is the same. So here is the question, will Google hit us with a penalty for having similar content across the 25 sites? If so, how do you handle this? We are trying to write create content, and unique content, but at the end of the day auto insurance in one city is pretty much the same as in another city. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | mavrick0 -
Duplicate Content from Google URL Builder
Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?
Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion0 -
Mapping Internal Links (Which are causing duplicate content)
I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else). I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird. Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0