Duplicate Content Question
-
My client's website is for an organization that is part of a larger organization - which has it's own website. We were given permission to use content from the larger organization's site on my client's redesigned site. The SEs will deem this as duplicate content, right? I can "re-write" the content for the new site, but it will still be closely based on the original content from the larger organization's site, due to the scientific/medical nature of the subject material. Is there a way around this dilemma so I do not get penalized? Thanks!
-
Just an idea, if you are part of the same company why don't you redirect the pages from the larger site and point them at your newly designed smaller site?
That way you won't get stung for duplicate content.
If that's not possible I would rewrite all the content from scratch, the problem with rehashing is that sometimes it's often harder, also you can write optimised SEO copy for your new site to help increase rankings and traffic
-
Keep in mind that many, many niche sites have this same problem. I mean, there's only so many ways to write compelling content on a very technical subject, right? Images, studies, videos, articles, quotes, news releases - all sources for a way to freshen up what you are "borrowing" from the larger organization's site.
-
I agree with Syed on this one. The main issue you are having that I see though is some of the information is so technical it would be hard to rewrite it. If you can’t completely rewrite the information do this next best thing, make sure the duplicate content (should only have duplicate content for the technical details) is a smaller part of the page’s content then it is. Maybe add content, like a summary, on the page and have it optimized for what the page is about .This way when the Google Bots see the page instead of seeing 80%-100% of duplicate content they see 10%-20% duplicate content and the rest is well written, optimized and original content. There will always be websites out there ranking well with some duplicate content. Google knows this. It is a matter of how much duplicate content you have. I hope this was helpful to you.
-
I would make sure its re-written to a major extent that it passes Copyscape check otherwise there is a possibility of duplicate content issue. Also, if possible I suggest you try to refer to many other credible sources as well on the same topic and not just source from the 'larger organizations' piece.
You can try and a have a unique take on this much more comprehensive piece. This will do two things: make sure your content is considered original & it could also make content more "link attractive" - so you attract more links & get good returns on the extra writing effort.
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 H1 Question & Landing Page help
Hi We have 2 H1's on this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving Our webmaster has put one as display:none - but isn't this just going to look like we're keyword spamming & trying to hide it? OK now I;m looking I am seeing more wrong with this page... The width buttons at the top as h2's...& they link to facet pages? Won't this just waste crawl budget? and every product title/user guide title etc are all H2's.... I just need to put a plan together to give to our dev team on what should be updated Any tips would be great. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
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 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Does having a page that ends with ? cause duplicate content?
I am working on a site that has lots of dynamic parameters. So lets say we have www.example.com/page?parameter=1 When the page has no parameters you can still end up at www.example.com/page? Should I redirect this to www.example.com/page/ ? Im not sure if Google ignores this, or if these pages need to be dealt with. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Duplicate content throughout multiple URLs dilemma
We have a website with lots of categories and there are problems that some subcategories have identical content on them. So, is it enough to just add different text on those problematic subcategories or we need to use "canonical" tag to main category. Same dilemma is with our search system and duplicate content. For example, "/category/sports" URL would have similar to identical content with "/search/sports" and "/search/sports-fitness/" URLs. Ranking factors is important for all different categories and subcategories. Ranking factors is also important for search individual keywords. So, the question is, how to make them somehow unique/different to rank on all those pages well? Would love to hear advices how it can be solved using different methods and how it would affect our rankings. When we actually need to use "canonical" tag and when 301 redirect is better. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versliukai0 -
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,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0