Duplicate Content issue: Amazon book review & company blog
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Can my site be penalized for including a book review verbatim in my blog that I also post on Amazon? What are the steps I need to take? I have written a book review that I want to post on Amazon. I am also planning to create a blog post and include the exact text of the review within the post which I will then also promote on my social channels. What do I need to watch out for in terms of duplicate content? Is there a sequence I should follow? We have the rel=canonical tag on our site which is WordPress.
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Thanks so much for the thorough answer, Paul. I was hoping I would get answers like these so I can go ahead. I appreciate your comments about ranking although, I am not sure I am concerned about that so much in this instance. I'll have to give it some thought.
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Thank you, Martijn. Just the answer I was hoping to hear.
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Agree with Martin - a single page like this won't be a problem as far as something like Panda penalising for dupe content.
However the challenge will be to get your page rank for the terms in the review ahead of the Amazon page (which is on such a strong domain that it will overpower your own page). To give your page the best chance, you'll want to publish your post that includes the review first, making sure you've hit all the on-page optimisation. It would also be good to have additional text to add to the review - an intro paragraph and summary for example. Then wait until it has been indexed in Google, while building at least a few links to your page - social mentions are great for this, as you mention.
Once your own post is indexed and ranking (do a search for a specific phrase from your review, for example) then you can post it on Amazon, This way, hopefully the search engines will have enough cues to recognise that your blog page was the first and definitive source for the review. Doesn't' always work but this gives you the best shot.
Nothing about canonicalisation on your blog page is going to help with this process. However, it certainly could be beneficial to have rel=author attribution from Google+ implemented on your blog.
Hope that helps answer the second part of your question?
Paul
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Hi Gina,
No you won't get penalized for only copying the review about a book on your blog while it's also on Amazon. It's only one page so Google won't make this a huge problem for your site.
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