Copying my content
-
Hi there,
I run a successful e-commerce website, which the product pages are rich with content linking to other products etc, one of our retailers who sell our products I just noticed copied and pasted the content I have written for these product pages leaving in all the links, which it turn are linking back to my product pages, is this a good thing? or should I make that retailer put in canonical tags?
Thanks for any help
-
Regarding your last point I am sure I recently watched a WBF were Rand had mentioned this was a good way of getting backlinks, I did question this myself when I heard this.
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your feedback.
This is becoming more of an issue for me, as we have literraly hundreds of online retailers selling our products, however they do not have the resource in creating new content for these product pages and I certainly don't for hundreds of different websites.
If I could persuade these retailers to put canonical and point it to my product pages would this benefit my SERPs?
-
Going to have to agree with Alan here. I've worked on a lot of ecommerce sites and as the categories fill up with competitors all using the same text it quickly becomes an issue of duplicate content and authorial ownership. What I've seen in the past is cost-sharing, where the manufacturer and the retailer will combine monies to hire authors to make retailer-specific content for those products. In part it depends on the category as well; something like clothing can have just about any old description, but something like a calculator is pretty hard to make sexy.
The links are another question entirely; in a way I don't see how they can do anything but be neutral, or helpful to you right now. It certainly establishes you as the originator of the content too.
-
You're facing one of the most challenging issues e-commerce sites face - and here's what I recommend to manufacturers -
Using canonical references might be beneficial to your site, however it leaves retailers unable to rank for those products. So every retail site that carries your products should have their own unique version of content - completely unique descriptions. This can be a challenge when there are a lot of products in the database, and of course would not apply to technical specifications within product detail pages, however it's vital for everyone's long term success to get the descriptive text to be truly unique. To the point where the majority of content on each product detail page that is unique outweighs the portion copied (product name, technical specifications, category assigned, etc.).
Whether YOU provide that unique content (and thus control the message), or require that your retailers do the heavy lifting is up to you to decide.
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
-
Inconsistency between content and structured data markup
Hi~ everyone What does Google think about the inconsistency between content and structured data markup? Is this kind of a cheating way ? Is hurt my SEO?
Technical SEO | | intern2020120 -
Is this going to be seen by google as duplicate content
Hi All, Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer in regards to this. I have been conducted a bit of analysis of our server access file to see what googlebot is doing, where it is going etc. Now firstly, I am not SEO but have an interest. What I am seeing a lot of is that we have URL's that have an extension that sets the currency that is displayed on the products so that we can conduct Adwords campaigns in other countries, these show as follows: feedurl=AUD, feedurl=USD, feedurl=EUR etc. What I can see is that google bot is hitting a URL such as /some_product, then /someproduct?feedurl=USD and then /someproduct?feedurl=EUR and then /someproduct?feedurl=AUD all after each other. Now this is the same product page and just has the price shown slightly different on each. Would this count as a duplicate content issue? Should I disavow feedurl? Any assistance that you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Duplicate Content Mystery
Hi Moz community! I have an ongoing duplicate mystery going on here and I'm hoping someone here can answer my question. We have an Ecommerce site that has a variety of product pages and category pages. There are Rel canonicals in place, along with parameters in GWT, and there are also URL rewrites. Here are some scenarios, maybe you can give insight as to what’s exactly going on and how to fix it. All the duplicates look to be coming from category pages specifically. For example:
Technical SEO | | Ecom-Team-Access
This link re-writes: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html?cat=407&color=152&price=20- To: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html The rel canonical tag looks like this: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html" /> The CONTENT is different, but the URLs are the same. It thinks that the product category view is the same as the all products view, even though there is a canonical in there telling it which one is the original. Some of them don’t have anything to do with each other. Take a look: Link identified as duplicate: http://www.incipio.com/cases/smartphone-cases/htc-smartphone-cases/htc-windows-phone-8x-cases.html?color=27&price=20- Link this is a duplicate of: http://www.incipio.com/cases/macbook-cases/macbook-pro-13in-cases.html Any idea as to what could be happening here?0 -
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Moving content
I have www.SiteA.com which contains a number of sections of content, a section of which (i.e. www.SiteA.com/sectionA), we would like to move to a new domain www.SiteB.com Definitely we will ensure that a redirect strategy is in place and that we submit a sitemap for SiteB Three Questions 1. Anything else I am missing from the migration plan? 2. Since we are only moving part of SiteA to SiteB, is there another way of telling Google that we changed address for that section or are the 301s enough? 3. Currently, Section A (under SiteA) contains a subsection where we were posting an article a day. In the new site (SiteB), we decided to drop this subsection and write content (but not "exactly" the same content) under a new section. During migration, how should we handle the subsection that we have decided to stop writing? Should we: A. Import the content into SiteB and call it archives and then redirect all the urls from subsection under SiteA to the archives under SiteB? OR B. Do not move the content but redirect all the pages (365 in total) to where we think the user would be more interested in going to on SiteB? Note: A colleague of mine is worried that since the subsection has good content he thinks its necessary to actually move the content to SiteB. But again, looking at the views for the archives it caters for 1% of the the total views of this section. In other words, people only view the article on the day it is written. I hope I was clear 🙂 Your help is appreciated Thank you
Technical SEO | | seo12120 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0