Product Syndication and duplicate content
-
Hi,
It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow.
For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id.
Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation?
Thanks
-
Hi,
Thank you all for your knowledge. I now feel better equipped.
Cheers
-
Yes, being indexed first is good, but then again a higher authority site tends to be crawled more frequently so even if you post first, you might not get indexed first.
Going back to your original question, if the higher-ranked sites that also sell your product choose to keep their canonical pointing to their own site, they may well outrank you. It sounds like having your listings on other sites is part of your business model so you can't do anything about that, but maybe you could create some content that is exclusive to your own site and have that rank.
Also, if you have a number of higher-authority sites that use your content and have canonicals pointing to you, that would be a clue to Google that yours is the original content, even if one of the sites keeps the canonical pointing to itself.
-
Hi, if you can get yours indexed first it would be seen as the original - otherwise it's difficult to tell.
-
Hi again,
At the risk of flogging a dead horse(and I ask merely for infomation); if both my site and the site(s) with the syndicated content have a rel canonical tag pointing to themselves as the authoritative source of the content; how does/can Google know which is the true source?
Is it that all sites with that content are negatively affected because the canonical page cannot be determined? Or is it possible that more authoritative site is considered to be the original? Does anyone have any insight/opinion/experience of this?
Thanks
-
Hi,
Ach, having looked the headers for our listings on one of the affiliate sites I can see that they have a canonical tag that points to their own site. Ok; now i know.
Thank you both for your help
-
Linda's answers sounds good and yes it does count as duplicate.
Hopefully they will agree to implement the tags as it shows you as the source and not them. Google doesn't always know which site something came from in the first place.
-
You could have your affiliates do a cross-domain canonical, pointing to the original content on your site.
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
-
International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?
Hi, A follow up question from another one I had a couple of months ago: It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors). Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
I believe it happens for two reasons: 1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place. 2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users. Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong? 2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder. Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one. I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what). That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way? Thank you so much!
G0 -
Questions about duplicate photo content?
I know that Google is a mystery, so I am not sure if there are answers to these questions, but I'm going to ask anyway! I recently realized that Google is not happy with duplicate photo content. I'm a photographer and have sold many photos in the past (but retained the rights for) that I am now using on my site. My recent revelations means that I'm now taking down all of these photos. So I've been reverse image searching all of my photos to see if I let anyone else use it first, and in the course of this I found out that there are many of my photos being used by other sites on the web. So my questions are: With photos that I used first and others have stolen, If I edit these photos (to add copyright info) and then re-upload them, will the sites that are using these images then get credit for using the original image first? If I have a photo on another one of my own sites and I take it down, can I safely use that photo on my main site, or will Google retain the knowledge that it's been used somewhere else first? If I sold a photo and it's being used on another site, can I safely use a different photo from the same series that is almost exactly the same? I am unclear what data from the photo Google is matching, and if they can tell the difference between photos that were taken a few seconds apart.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lina5000 -
I have search result pages that are completely different showing up as duplicate content.
I have numerous instances of this same issue in our Crawl Report. We have pages showing up on the report as duplicate content - they are product search result pages for completely different cruise products showing up as duplicate content. Here's an example of 2 pages that appear as duplicate : http://www.shopforcruises.com/carnival+cruise+lines/carnival+glory/2013-09-01/2013-09-30 http://www.shopforcruises.com/royal+caribbean+international/liberty+of+the+seas We've used Html 5 semantic markup to properly identify our Navigation <nav>, our search widget as an <aside>(it has a large amount of page code associated with it). We're using different meta descriptions, different title tags, even microformatting is done on these pages so our rich data shows up in google search. (rich snippet example - http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.shopforcruises.com%2Froyal%2Bcaribbean%2Binternational%2Fliberty%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bseas&oq=http:%2F%2Fwww.shopforcruises.com%2Froyal%2Bcaribbean%2Binternational%2Fliberty%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bseas&gs_l=hp.3...1102.1102.0.1601.1.1.0.0.0.0.142.142.0j1.1.0...0.0...1c.1.7.psy-ab.gvI6vhnx8fk&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44442042,d.eWU&fp=a03ba540ff93b9f5&biw=1680&bih=925 ) How is this distinctly different content showing as duplicate? Is SeoMoz's site crawl flawed (or just limited) and it's not understanding that my pages are not dupe? Copyscape does not identify these pages as dupe. Should we take these crawl results more seriously than copyscape? What action do you suggest we take? </aside> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JMFieldMarketing0 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0 -
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 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0