News sites & Duplicate content
-
Hi SEOMoz
I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world?
Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific.
Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place.
News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc.
All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Chris Captivate -
Ditto on what Donnie said. Purple Cow, if you want that site to be an authority, it needs to be authoritative. Why would anyone buy the Washington Post if it just copied all its articles from the New York times? Get a few staff writers to combine and tweak articles as Donnie mentioned or to write original content.
Good luck!
-
Well if you are going to duplicate someones article they deserve the credit. I would recommend combining two or three article sand adding some personal value to it. Create something unique that your audience will like. Also linking to a reputable source shows Google that you are relevant to something. If you run an SEOmoz report card they recommend an external link to a relavent source.
-
Problem is this way I still give authority to another news source that I am competing against. I will be devaluing my pages.
-
You must trackback(link back) to the original content. Otherwise Google looks at your content as duplicate. As as you give the original content credit you can avoid duplicate content.
However If you don't want this content to appear in your sites index but you do want it to appear on your site for your users do: noindex, follow -
Or you could use a rel=canonical tag and call out the original post as the canonical post.
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
Duplicate ecommerce sites, SEO implications & others?
We have an established eCom site built out with custom php, dedicated SERPs, traffic, etc.. The question has arisen on how to extend commerce on social and we have found a solution with Shopify. In order to take advantage of this, we'd need to build out a completely new site in Shopify and would have to have the site live in order to have storefronts on Pinterest and Twitter. Aside from the obvious problem with having two databases, merchant processing, etc, does anyone know whether there are SEO implications to having two live sites with duplicate products? Could we just disavow a Shopify store in Webmaster Tools? Any other thoughts or suggestions? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PAC31350 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0