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
-
Big retailers and duplicate content
Hello there! I was wondering if you guys have experience with big retailers sites fetching data via API (PDP content etc.) from another domain which is also sharing the same data with other multiple sites. If each retailer has thousands on products, optimizing PDP content (even in batches) is quite of a cumbersome task and rel="canonical" pointing to original domain will dilute the value. How would you approach this type of scenario? Looking forward to read your suggestions/experiences Thanks a lot! Best Sara
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraCoppola1 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Does link building through content syndication still actually work?
I stumbled across this old SEOmoz whilteboard http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively and was wondering if this is still a valid technique given the Panda & Penguin updates. Is anyone here still doing this (and seeing results)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Duplicate content clarity required
Hi, I have access to a masive resource of journals that we have been given the all clear to use the abstract on our site and link back to the journal. These will be really useful links for our visitors. E.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/59210832213382K2 Simply, if we copy the abstract and then link back to the journal source will this be treated as duplicate content and damage the site or is the link to the source enough for search engines to realise that we aren't trying anything untoward. Would it help if we added an introduction so in effect we are sort of following the curating content model? We are thinking of linking back internally to a relevant page using a keyword too. Will this approach give any benefit to our site at all or will the content be ignored due to it being duplicate and thus render the internal links useless? Thanks Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayderby0 -
Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is. I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation. e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City] I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpecialCase0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe. The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time. Does anybody know a fix for this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | royb0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0