Will having duplicate content on four websites cause a problem?
-
A client of ours has four websites for different shops they run in the surrounding area. Each website has original content as well as duplicate content. This is for things like product advice which needs to be the same
Will having duplicate content on these four websites cause a problem? How can it be mitigated? We can't refer the visitor to another website to get the product information as this will break the user experience, and of course shopping cart sessions will not pass on.
-
Hi Tom,
Are they on the same server and linking to each other? If so, then just canonical them. Im also assuming from what you said that it's just a few pages so it shouldn't be any problem. That, or just edit the pages a wee bit.
If they are on different servers and practically can't be traced to be related to each other, then I wouldn't even worry about it. Just being practical.
-
Hi Tom
It might also be worth checking if the clients e-commerce platforms will allow you to add tags into the head. Some ERP website or cloud based sites don't so worth checking from the get go
Bruce
-
Hi Tom
Short answer is that it probably won't be a problem. From what you are saying the duplication is 'natural' in the sense it is information which you might normally expect to see duplicated since it relates to similar products across multiple sites (also think privacy policy or terms and conditions pages). In this case it is unlikely to attract a penalty.
Matt Cutts covered that topic in this video (posted on SearchEngineLand): Duplicate Content Won't Hurt You Unless its Spammy.
However, it will probably mean you are leaving it up to the search engine to decide which 'version' of your duplicate content it should prioritise and serve up to people searching. If it is not important to rank for the content on these duplicate pages then again it is not really an issue.
However if you want to play safe or aim to get some rankings for a specific page - among all the duplicate versions, you can use a rel=canonical tag to let the search engines know which page is the "original" so that they will prioritise this one (ie point the link juice at a specific page). Matt Cutts talks about that in this video (although he talks about it in the context of a news article).
Check out this Moz article on Duplicate Content - it also has a short explanation on how to use the rel=canonical.
All the best
Neil
-
use the canonical tag it will let you keep the pages where they are (as well as visitors) but tell Google which page is the original. As for harm it depends on how many pages I wouldn't see it being the greatest harm but its so easy to put the tag on you might as well do that. A quick heads up though by putting the tag on pages it means one page will rank but the others will no so be aware of that.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Where to outsource product pages contents?
We have been told to write good unique content for every products but we just don't have the skill nor the time. (english is not my first-language) Can anyone suggest where to find a good product content writer?
Content Development | | ringochan0 -
New website launched
hi folks i launched a new website last month can anyone tell me how long it normally takes for google to pick them up? is there any of speeding up the process as i want to launch another one by the end of the month. the address of this one is www.thebookshop.ie cheers donal
Content Development | | homebrew10 -
Content Marketing - Car Space
Hey looking for cool content marketing examples in the car industry. Like major car companies leveraging their resources, in developing awesome, and viral content. Anyone aware of any cool campaigns? Cheers, Mark
Content Development | | MBASydney0 -
Stolen Content and a Panda Penalty
Hey Folks Question for those folks that have spent some time helping people with the recent penalties and the like. I have a client who has a clear Panda Penalty, huge drop in traffic on the initial Panda date and a further drop on the second date. Much smaller incremental drops on subsequent recent updates as well. From digging in it seems fairly cut and dry - copyscape shows another 250 or so sites with content from this site and there are nearly 2000 external URLs with duplicate content across these sites. We are talking complete, shameless copies of all of the text, sometimes the images as well. The client claims the content is all 100% unique and is his content and that the other blogs must have stolen his content resulting in the penalty - which, if it is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, kind of sucks. Now, many moons ago, way before Penguin or Panda (maybe around 2006) I had a client that had suddenly lost all traffic and their historical rankings. No funny business, it was a small company, had been online since around 2000 and they were pretty much the first of their kind and always did very well from organic search. As it turned out, the content from the site had not really changed since it was set up and as lots of companies had sprung up offering a similar service they had seen their content copied wholesale, across many sites, all over the world. We attempted to contact many of these sites and got some results but many were just old, abandoned copy cat sites on advert supported hosting that had ceased to trade so we maybe got rid of about 20%. Well, in the end we just decided to rewrite the content, we did this and sure enough, the site bounced back to it's previous standing and has been pretty much there ever since. Now that was kind of easy, the site had maybe 20 pages, and it needed a sprucing up but in this case the site has around 500 pages so doing a rewrite is not going to be so easy. Problem is, I don't see removal requests being particularly successful either. So, I see the options and steps as being. Contact all the sites and request the removal of the content use the Google content removal facility:
Content Development | | Marcus_Miller
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals File a DMCA takedown for anything remaining Report Scraped Pages to Google:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGM4TXhIOFd3c1hZR2NHUDN1NmllU0E6MQ&ndplr=1 Submit a spam report for all sites involved ? Submit a reconsideration request to let Google know what we have been doing (unlikely In a nutshell, do everything we can to get this content removed and then documenting this to Google in the hope we catch hold of someone who hears our plight. Interestingly enough, this is a sensitive one, so no URL but I would welcome any thoughts or experiences any of you may have had with similar problems. There is a little extra info here from Matt Cutts + Barry Schwartz that kind of tallies with my approach above but would really like to hear any feedback. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-stolen-content-13243.html Cheers all Marcus0 -
Looking for a voice to put on my website
hi i have a voice on my website http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am looking for a new better one that are based in the UK. can anyone please let me know if they use voice widgets on their site and if so which company they use. I am looking for a better one in the UK which offers a better service as well as being vat registered. any help would be great
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Blog content practices for e-commerce sites
What is the best practice in regards to content for e-commerce blogs on the same domain as the web-store (blog.storename.com)? What balance of content should be on the blog vs. the item & section pages or doesn't it matter?
Content Development | | MEldridge0 -
Duplicate content and Facebook
If i have content on my site and the same content duplicated on my facebook pages, will google treat this as duplicate content? At the moment when i copy and paste a line of text from the content on my site Facebook is returned first.
Content Development | | Turkey0 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0