Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate content on partner site
-
I have a trade partner who will be using some of our content on their site. What's the best way to prevent any duplicate content issues?
Their plan is to attribute the content to us using rel=author tagging. Would this be sufficient or should I request that they do something else too?
Thanks
-
Cross-domain canonical is the most viable option here. As Mike and Chris said, it is possible for Google to ignore the tag in some cases, but it's a fairly strong suggestion. There are two main reasons I'd recommend it:
(1) Syndicated content is the entire reason Google allowed the use of rel=canonical across domains. SEOs I know at large publishers have used it very effectively. While your situation may not be entirely the same, it sounds similar to a syndicated content scenario.
(2) It's really your only viable option. While a 301-redirect is almost always honored by Google, as Chris suggested, it's also very different. A 301 will take the visitors on the partner site page directly to your page, and that's not your intent. Rel=canonical will leave visitors on the partner page, but tell search engines to credit that page to the source. Google experimented with a content syndication tag, but that tag's been deprecated, so in most cases rel=canonical is the best choice we have left.
-
As far as I'm aware and webmaster guide lines are the following is true :
"Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the
rel="canonical"
link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While therel="canonical"
link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."canonical is for on page more than off site.
Supporting this Matt Cutts mentions that they prefer 301
So bit of truth in it
-
My favorite answer... Canonicals. If your trade partner's site places rel="canonical" tags pointing back to the original source of the content on your site then there shouldn't be any duplicate content issue. Of course Canonicals are suggestions not directives so the search engines reserve the right not to follow the tag if they deem it irrelevant. Using the tag in this way will essentially pass all the equity to your site and rank your page instead of your trade partner. Your trade partner would basically get no benefit of having your content as far as Search is concerned. The better option for everyone would likely be to write unique and relevant content.
-
Hi,
You may want to read the following :
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
Technically you should be fine though I never recommend duplicate content across sites It reduced the quality across both sites. As long as there is a link back to original source you should be ok.
-
Hi Chris. I don't care about the trade partner. But are you saying I could receive a penalty if they copy and paste content off my website? Surely that's not fair!
-
Easy fix - don't use duplicate content!
You will still receive a penalty it's better to take the time to rewrite or get fresh content.
They can link to your site if they want to use the content as the user would still see the content but just putting a duplicate of the content on their site will result in a drop for the both of you although it may not happen right away it will over time
Hope this help, and good luck!
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 in sidebar
Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
Multilingual site with untranslated content
We are developing a site that will have several languages. There will be several thousand pages, the default language will be English. Several sections of the site will not be translated at first, so the main content will be in English but navigation/boilerplate will be translated. We have hreflang alternate tags set up for each individual page pointing to each of the other languages, eg in the English version we have: etc In the spanish version, we would point to the french version and the english version etc. My question is, is this sufficient to avoid a duplicate content penalty for google for the untranslated pages? I am aware that from a user perspective, having untranslated content is bad, but in this case it is unavoidable at first.
On-Page Optimization | | jorgeapartime0 -
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?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Duplicate Content when Using "visibility classes" in responsive design layouts? - a SEO-Problem?
I have text in the right column of my responsive layout which will show up below the the principal content on small devices. To do this I use visibility classes for DIVs. So I have a DIV with with a unique style text that is visible only on large screen sizes. I copied the same text into another div which shows only up only on small devices while the other div will be hidden in this moment. Technically I have the same text twice on my page. So this might be duplicate content detected as SPAM? I'm concerned because hidden text on page via expand-collapsable textblocks will be read by bots and in my case they will detect it twice?Does anybody have experiences on this issue?bestHolger
On-Page Optimization | | inlinear0 -
Duplicate Content from on Competitor's site?
I've recently discovered large blocks of content on a competitors site that has been copy and pasted from a client's site. From what I know, this will only hurt the competitor and not my client since my guy was the original. Is this true? Is there any risk to my client? Should we take action? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | Dino640