Finding Duplicate Content Spanning more than one Site?
-
Hi forum, SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site to another site to see if they share "duplicate content?" Thanks!
-
The Alert thing is great! I use it when we write new content (along with CopyScape after a week or so) just so I can make sure I'm outranking it. lol
-
Yes. I totally agree with Darin. There isn't a duplicate content penalty, per se, and the tools he listed are quite good suggestions as well.
-
IMHO, even if the HTML is different you could have duplicate content if the H1 or paragraph text is substantially similar. However, is this automatically penalized? No. Syndication of content can be quite prevalent on the Web. For example the AP breaks a news story and posts it online and it is subsequently picked up by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Wherever the content appeared first, particularly if it has a canonical tag in place, that source will be credited with having the original content. The other sites aren't going to be penalized, but they aren't going to benefit from it either.
Similar things happen on large e-commerce sites all the time. For example, 100's of e-commerce stores sell lightbulbs. Those descriptions are most certainly "substantially similar." It'd be kind of strange if they weren't. They aren't penalized for that.
I hope this is helpful! It is always good to set up a Google Alert for any great pieces of content you do write, just so you can be aware of who might be copying your stuff! (Tynt.com can also be very useful for this).
Good luck!
Dana
-
Just for the record there isn't any "Duplicate Content Penalty" so don't worry to much about this. Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.
However, to answer your question I use copyscape to do this but you have to insert a URL and not just lines at a time.
Here are some other ones I've heard good things about:
I agree with Dana on the Google thing too. Like she said, "Just be sure to put quotes around your snippet."
-
This helps, thanks Dana. Is the actual paragraph content the main source of a duplicate content penalty? For example, what if the pages share different metadata and the HTML is entirely different except for the H1 text and paragraph content?
-
Hi Zora,
This best way to do this is to grab a random section of text from the page and go to Google, then paste that section of text in the search bar inside "quotes." For example, from your question above, I could search:
"SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site"
you will see that the result in Google is a result to this page (once it's been indexed, which hasn't happened quite yet) - Just be sure to put quotes around your snippet.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
Duplicate Content with URL Parameters
Moz is picking up a large quantity of duplicate content, consists mainly of URL parameters like ,pricehigh & ,pricelow etc (for page sorting). Google has indexed a large number of the pages (not sure how many), not sure how many of them are ranking for search terms we need. I have added the parameters into Google Webmaster tools And set to 'let google decide', However Google still sees it as duplicate content. Is it a problem that we need to address? Or could it do more harm than good in trying to fix it? Has anyone had any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Dealing with close content - duplicate issue for closed products
Hello I'm dealing with some issues. Moz analyses is telling me that I have duplicate on some of my products pages. My issue is that: Concern very similar products IT products are from the same range Just the name and pdf are different Do you think I should use canonical url ? Or it will be better to rewrite about 80 descriptions (but description will be almost the same) ? Best regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
I have two sites that have no duplicate content (yet). One ranks better than the other but has a crappy hyphenated domain name (Domain A), and the other one is the "brand site" with a better domain name (Domain B). I'm creating a blog with technical articles and corresponding videos. I want the videos to refer to the better domain name (Domain B) because I can't see referring people to a hyphenated domain (it would sound horrible). But, the hyphenated domain has a better chance of improving it's rankings (long story why). Can I duplicate the content and just use a canonical tag on Domain B to give the credit to Domain A? If I do that, is it done on each post? Or the blog's main page? What I think would happen is any links to Domain B would pass the juice to Domain A. Is that correct? I know Canonical's are tricky and I don't want to screw this up, so I'd greatly appreciate some advice from the experienced people on here. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhoenixDev0 -
One site for multiple regions with a twist?
Hi there. I'm hoping to tap into the collective wisdom of this great community. I've just become involved in a business that spans two countries Australia and New Zealand. Currently we have one site in Australia "AAAA.com.au" and a similar site in New Zealand which is a joint venture with another company so for some reason they chose to merge the names to get "BBAAAA.co.nz". The Australian site is hosted in Australia and ranks #1 for targeted keywords in a competitive industry. The New Zealand site is hosted in NZ and has been live for nearly 2 years but ranks very poorly with targeted keywords i.e. not in the top 50! The content on sites is similar but not the same and phone numbers and location details are different etc. The NZ site has not been link building which is likely the main issue. What I want to do is now change the BBAAAA.co.nz site to AAAA.co.nz (the other company has agreed the name change is warranted) and service New Zealand from Australia using our well performing site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this to maximise the good ranking of the Australian site? The Australian site has a lot of back links from a range of sites. I've taken into account the following info at Google but I'm still stuck for the best answer given our tricky situation. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=182192#2 Would love to hear your thoughts on how to approach this one. Cheers in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ICMI0