How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
-
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author?
Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A.
Will that work, or is there a better solution?
This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
-
Thanks grasshopper!
-
No; site B is using Spry, a now defunct Adobe framework: http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2012/08/update-on-adobe-spry-framework-availability.html
Site A uses ExpressionEngine.
-
Hi Allie,
You're absolutely on the right track. Cross-domain canonicalization was created to deal with situations exactly like the one you're describing. I've used it many times, and it works great.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
Im pretty sure you can trackback to the original.. Are you using wordpress?
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 content across similar computer "models" and how to properly handle it.
I run a website that revolves around a niche rugged computer market. There are several "main" models for each computer that also has several (300-400) "sub" models that only vary by specifications for each model. My problem is I can't really consolidate each model to one product page to avoid duplicate content. To have something like a drop down list would be massive and confusing to the customer when they could just search the model they needed. Also I would say 80-90% of the market searches for a specific model when they go to purchase or in Google. A lot of our customers are city government, fire departments, police departments etc. they get a list of approved models and purchase off that they don't really search by specs or "configure" a model so each model number having a chance to rank is important. Currently we have all models in each sub category rel=canonical back to the main category page for that model. Is there a better way to go about this? Example page you can see how there are several models all product descriptions are the same they only vary by model writing a unique description for each one is an unrealistic possibility for us. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated I keep going back on forth on what the correct solution would be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Rugged_Store0 -
A lot of news / Duplicate Content - what to do?
Hi All, I have a blog with a lot of content (news and pr messages), I want to move my blog to new domain. What is your recommendation? 1. Keep it as is. old articles -> 301 -> same article different URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
2. Remove all the duplicate content and create 301 from the old URL to my homepage.
3. Keep it as is, but add in the meta-tags NoIndex in duplicate articles. Thanks !0 -
Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?
Hi all, We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty. Here's a detailed information about our case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stj
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com. What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs. What are the other options?0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
What is the best way to hide duplicate, image embedded links from search engines?
**Hello! Hoping to get the community’s advice on a technical SEO challenge we are currently facing. [My apologies in advance for the long-ish post. I tried my best to condense the issue, but it is complicated and I wanted to make sure I also provided enough detail.] Context: I manage a human anatomy educational website that helps students learn about the various parts of the human body. We have been around for a while now, and recently launched a completely new version of our site using 3D CAD images. While we tried our best to design our new site with SEO best practices in mind, our daily visitors dropped by ~15%, despite drastic improvements we saw in our user interaction metrics, soon after we flipped the switch. SEOMoz’s Website Crawler helped us uncover that we now may have too many links on our pages and that this could be at least part of the reason behind the lower traffic. i.e. we are not making optimal use of links and are potentially ‘leaking’ link juice now. Since students learn about human anatomy in different ways, most of our anatomy pages contain two sets of links: Clickable links embedded via JavaScript in our images. This allows users to explore parts of the body by clicking on whatever objects interests them. For example, if you are viewing a page on muscles of the arm and hand and you want to zoom in on the biceps, you can click on the biceps and go to our detailed biceps page. Anatomy Terms lists (to the left of the image) that list all the different parts of the body on the image. This is for users who might not know where on the arms the biceps actually are. But this user could then simply click on the term “Biceps” and get to our biceps page that way. Since many sections of the body have hundreds of smaller parts, this means many of our pages have 150 links or more each. And to make matters worse, in most cases, the links in the images and in the terms lists go to the exact same page. My Question: Is there any way we could hide one set of links (preferably the anchor text-less image based links) from search engines, such that only one set of links would be visible? I have read conflicting accounts of different methods from using JavaScript to embedding links into HTML5 tags. And we definitely do not want to do anything that could be considered black hat. Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Eric**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R0 -
HTTPS Duplicate Content?
I just recieved a error notification because our website is both http and https. http://www.quicklearn.com & https://www.quicklearn.com. My tech tells me that this isn't actually a problem? Is that true? If not, how can I address the duplicate content issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0