Duplicate Content Question
-
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results...
I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something:
Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
-
yeah, it's strange...if you look at my reply to the first response, you will see the urls.
the page that copies content shows up #1 for "stem cell transplant boston" while the original page shows up for "stem cell transplant" (page 3) and other searches.
-
Thanks for your reply. The target pages show up.
I recognize that the canonical tag will basically give all teh exposure to the target page. I'm just wondering if the target page will see an improvement in rankings.
-
Thanks very much.
Yes, most of the content on the two sites is unique
The sites do interlink but not on these pages
Not on same IP
Yes, both sites have good authority
Here is the site originating the content:
-
Mark's right, you need to be providing signals to the search engines as to which one is the original. Quite often if most of the metrics are similar, the first article that Google crawls is given the weighting of the original. Linking back from the duplicate will help. I would also suggest leaving a delay before syndicating the content to allow Google to find the original.
With regards to both pages ranking that is slightly odd - is this on a very specific / long tail search? For example have you searched for the whole article title or something like that?
-
When you say both sites show up in results, but for different queries, are you referring to the actual duplicate content pages/articles, or the homepage and other target pages. These pages/sites may be ranking for these different terms due to strength of the site/page and backlink profiles.
In terms of canonical tags, if one site is going to be doing a cross domain canonical to the other site, I don't see how this could help the site that is doing the cross domain canonical. The site receiving the canonical tag and being credited as the source of the original content, I could see this helping them and helping the page of content to rank higher, but I don't see why this would help the site linking out with the cross domain canonical.
My suggestion - the site producing the content should get the credit, cross domain canonicals should be used to associate the credit for the content with the site producing the content, and you should also include a piece of text in the content piece that says this originally appeared on xyz website, or something along those lines. I'd provide as many signals to the engines as possible as to where to attribute this content.
-
I have seen that happen sometimes. There could be multiple reasons. Here are the questions I would suggest you look into to get a better read on the reasoning behind it:
1. Is there any other content on the 2 websites that is independent and not duplicated between the 2 sites ?
2. Are the 2 sites interlinking to each other ? (I am guessing not.)
3. Are the 2 sites on the same IP ? (I am guessing not.)
4. Are both the domains/sites pretty established, authority, with tons of unique backlinks from industry sites ?I am sure answers to the above questions would lead you to a better read on the original question. If not, let me know what the answers are and if you'd like to share the URLs, I would love to look at them.
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 but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Duplicate content based on filters
Hi Community, There have probably been a few answers to this and I have more or less made up my mind about it but would like to pose the question or as that you post a link to the correct article for this please. I have a travel site with multiple accommodations (for example), obviously there are many filter to try find exactly what you want, youcan sort by region, city, rating, price, type of accommodation (hotel, guest house, etc.). This all leads to one invevitable conclusion, many of the results would be the same. My question is how would you handle this? Via a rel canonical to the main categories (such as region or town) thus making it the successor, or no follow all the sub-category pages, thereby not allowing any search to reach deeper in. Thanks for the time and effort.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
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 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0