Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
-
Hi,
We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc...
We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site.
My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok?
We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not.
So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics.
Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs?
Cheers
-
I think the only time you need to be worried about this is if you have the exact same content published on your own website/blog.
If you do, ensure you add a
rel="author"link (to either author page on site or Google+ profile) and that your webpage is indexed in the search engine before any other site publish identical or similar content. -
thanks for your responses. the press release hasn't been submitted to a pr website. i have emailed indivual sites/blogs and newspapers to see if they will publish the charity night we did.
so it is all real news of an event that actually happened.
cheers
-
Since you are actually distributing "Real News" and not just fluff news to target keywords for SEO - I would think "spinning" it would be worse....
But to be honest - It is a hard question to answer - as Technically a press release is not supposed to be posted on others sites word for word --- a press release is to bait journalists/bloggers to write about your story - Only once the days of easy manipulation was it turned into some other type of "link building" strategy.
I would suggest submitting the same one - But with sites like PRweb, it is hard these days to really justify it, as to be honest is it not just a big network to gain links?
IMHO of course
-
Not necessarily -
Alot of PRWebs high authority distribution network is Nofollow
Also just because it is picked up, does not mean it is not duplicate content - or will not be treated as dup content in the future
Over the past few years I have personally seen a massive depreciation of Online Press Release distribution "White Hat" SEO benefits.
I also am not sure I would agree post Panda/Penguin - that Press releases are a good way to pass "Link Juice"
I am not saying it is a lost cause, but just feel your assesment is a little circa 2009, 2010
-
I use PRWeb to distribute press releases, and while each press release gets picked up anywhere by 30 - 100 news outlets, I haven't yet noticed any issues with it being tagged as duplicated content.....it's more so a way to get link juice to your website. If multiple news sources publish the same press release it doesn't reflect negatively on your site metrics, it's a good thing.
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
-
Upper and lower case URLS coming up as duplicate content
Hey guys and gals, I'm having a frustrating time with an issue. Our site has around 10 pages that are coming up as duplicate content/ duplicate title. I'm not sure what I can do to fix this. I was going to attempt to 301 direct the upper case to lower but I'm worried how this will affect our SEO. can anyone offer some insight on what I should be doing? Update: What I'm trying to figure out is what I should do for our URL's. For example, when I run an audit I'm getting two different pages: aaa.com/BusinessAgreement.com and also aaa.com/businessagreement.com. We don't have two pages but for some reason, Google thinks we do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmac1 -
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Submitting Same Press Release Content to Multiple PR Sites - Good or Bad Practice?
I see some PR (press release) sites where they distribute the same content on many different sites and at end they give the source link is that Good SEO Practice or Bad ? If it is Good Practice then how Google Panda or other algorithms consider it ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
How to resolve duplicate content issues when using Geo-targeted Subfolders to seperate US and CAN
A client of mine is about to launch into the USA market (currently only operating in Canada) and they are trying to find the best way to geo-target. We recommended they go with the geo-targeted subfolder approach (___.com and ___.com/ca). I'm looking for any ways to assist in not getting these pages flagged for duplicate content. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jyoung2220 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
Looking to increase the quality of our backlinks with a press release: Business wire or Prweb?
Hello all! We are looking to increase the quality of backlinks to our new website www.unitedfitnessmarketing.com and wondering which service would be more beneficial. Care to share any preferences or advice? We have been live for about 3 1/2 months now. We are in a tough niche to find related backlinking websites. We are in the health club marketing consulting field. I just paid for a business.com listing but was thinking a quality press release would give me more juice. My competitors have used free press release services so I'm thinking I could easily one-up them and gain some ground in the rankings. Leaning more towards business wire b/c it's a berkshire hathaway company but would like more input. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unitedfitness0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1