Duplicate Content on Event Pages
-
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
-
A penalty is something google will have to manually remove and you will be able to see that in webmaster tools. A devaluation is when you are adjusted by the algorithm and lowered as a result because each thing that google does not like acts as points against you but you can quickly change and see your results return. Does that make sense?
-
We decided that it was worth a large investment as we would own the content ourselves and not worry in the future about anyone claiming ownership to the content as google gets stricter. So we re wrote half a million words!
-
Also could you fully explain the difference between devaluation and a penalty?
-
Do you mind if I ask how much of the content you re-wrote? My main fear is the amount of work that this would take since a lot of content goes up on the site daily. If the content is re-written did you do the same amount of content or did you re-write your office space listings with less content?
-
This is a Panda issue.
Google has said many times with affiliate sites that use the same content that if they do a better job than the original site it will rank them. So its not all bad when you look at it from that point of view.
However, Google loves unique content and will do its best to rank sites first that have the unique content. I have a business in the office space industry and a few years back we used to aggregate office apace listings which were shared amongst 30+ sites. The display of these listings would be different for many searches but the content was the same as all the other sites. This slowly put us in a PANDA DEVALUATION (there is no panda penalty).
After re-writing them with our clients we saw a significant change once the content had be re-crawled.
So it can have a great effect. If Google starts to see that large parts of your site are duplicate content it will start to question the authority you have in your industry.
Could you offer and incentive to your customers to write something unique? And also maybe inform your users not to copy and paste their own content on your site as this could affect them negatively in Google?
If you are an authority could you tell users that if you want to be listed it must be unique? Or if its a paid service have an ad on service for a few bucks where you write a professional description? Might become a nice additional income?
Just a few ideas
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 from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
How do I fix duplicate page issue on Shopify with duplicate products because of collections.
I'm working with a new client with a site built on Shopify. Most of their products appear in four collections. This is creating a duplicate content challenge for us. Can anyone suggest specific code to add to resolve this problem. I'm also interested in other ideas solutions, such as "don't use collections" if that's the best approach. I appreciate your insights. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | quiltedkoala0 -
How to overcome blog page 1, 2, 3, etc having no or duplicate meta info?
As the above what is the best way to overcome having the same meta info on your blog pages (not blog posts) So if you have 25 blog posts per page once you exceed this number you then move onto a second blog page, then when you get to 50 you then move onto a 3rd blog page etc etc So if you have thousands f blog pages what is the best method to deal with this rather than having to write 100s of different meta titkes & descriptions? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | webguru20141 -
Duplicate content issues?
Our company consists of several smaller companies, some of whom deal with very similar things. For instance, two of our companies resell accounts software, but only one provides after-sales support. Because of the number of different companies and websites we have, sometimes it would be easier to simply copy content from one site to the other, optimised in the same manner as, in some instances, we would want different websites to rank for the same keywords. I have been asked my opinion on the potential impact of this practice and my initial response was that we should avoid this due to potential penalties. However, I thought I'd garner opinion from a wider audience before making any recommendations either way. What do people think? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | HBPGroup0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
Duplicated Content with joomla multi language website
Dear Seomoz Community I am running a multi language joomla website (www.siam2nite.com) with 2 active languages. The first and primary language is english. the second language is thai. Most of the content (articles, event descriptions ...) is in english only. What we did is a thai translation for the navigation bars, headers, titles etc (translation of all joomla language files) those texts are static and only help the user navigate / understand our site in their thai language. Now I facing a problem with duplicated content. Lets take our Q&A component as example. the url structure looks like this: english - www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/ thai - www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/ Every question asked will create two URL, one for each language. The content itself (user questions & answers) is identical on both URL's. Only the GUI language is different. If you take a look at this question you will understand what i mean: ENGLISH VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok THAI VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok As you can see each page has a unique title (H1) and introduction text in the correct language (same for menu, buttons, etc.) but the questions and answers are only available in one language. Now my question 😉 I guess Google will see this pages as duplicated content. How should I proceed with this problem: put all thai links /th/questions/ in the robots.txt and block them or make a canonical tag for the english versions? Not sure if I set a canonical tag google will still index the thai title and introduction texts (they have important thai keywords in them) Would really appreciate your help on this 😉 Regards, Menelik
On-Page Optimization | | menelik0 -
Duplicate Page Content Question
This article was published on fastcompany.com on March 19th. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/designing-facebook It did not receive much traffic, so it was re-posted on Co.Design today (March 27th) where it has received significantly more traffic. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669366/facebook-agrees-the-secret-to-its-future-success-is-design My question is if google will dock us for reprinting/reusing content on another site (even if it is a sister site within the same company). If they do frown on that, is there a proper way to attribute the content to the source material/site (fastcompany.com)?
On-Page Optimization | | DanAsadorian0 -
Framed Pages and Dynamic Pages
Has anyone else had experience with different CMS's for Ecommerce . Ones that create static pages and others that dynamically create pages. What differences have you seen with rankings on google with the two. Here are two examples of sites using static framed pages and one with a system that dynamically creates pages - http://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/ - static frames and http://www.floraselect.co.uk - dynamically
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0