How to measure the penalty of duplicate content if we populate our provider bios on WebMD?
-
I work for a large healthcare system and we have an initiative to populate 2,500 of our our provider bios on WebMD. The proposed method for providing content is to supply it via API, in exactly the same way provider bio content appears on our site.
When my colleague and I pointed out this would be an anti-practice as it would be disseminating duplicate content, we were asked to weigh:
- The penalty of the duplication
- The time and resources necessary to provide an alternative method (i.e., is there a programmatic way to supply unique content to WebMD)
A few other questions we are investigating is if we can include links to each provider bio from WebMD to our main site. If this is the case, we can include a very short intro and direct users to our site if they want to learn more. The benefit of being included on WebMD is showing up for searches pertaining to expertise/specialties, as this will open our system to new users who likely won't search our providers by name.
Any advice on how to measure the potential effect of displaying duplicate content on WebMD, considering their impressive domain authority?
-
Thanks, all. I'll present these findings to our organization and we'll go from there.
-
No worries
-
Thanks Andy for sharing that post!
-
No problem at all John - please reply back if you have any other questions.
-Andy
-
Andy, glad I read that post - a great one. Thanks.
-
Hi,
I just want to address a point that has been missed here because duplicate content across domains is one of the Panda signals to Google and can end up resulting in an algorithm hit. Remember that how Google treats your own internal duplicate content and that on an external site are very different.
A good rule of thumb is do NOT expect to rank high in Google with content found on other, more trusted sites, and don’t expect to rank at all if all you are using is automatically generated pages with no ‘value add’.
Have a read of this article as it runs through lots of information regarding duplicate content. Here is another excerpt to be mindful of...
…in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. GOOGLE.
I would never advise duplicating content to be used across different domains - this is a very bad practice and one that should be avoided at all costs.
CleverPhD has advised the best way to handle this and re-write the content for the Bios.
-Andy
-
Just to follow-up on Russ' point, if you want to estimate cost. Contract out a couple part-time writers to go and do some web research on the providers and rewrite the bios/profiles. You will need someone from your internal team to supervise the part-timers who is familiar with the healthcare industry and writing to look through and make sure that what the writers put down is correct. This should take you 4-6 months. Your costs will be the 60-70% salary for the full-time person (as they will not just be doing this project), plus plan to pay about 20 bucks an hour for 20 hours a week from each part timer. You can adjust and get another (third) part-timer if you like for a bit more cost but faster results.
We did this for about 2,000 locations for a site I work on. We found that you would not want to have anyone doing this full-time as they would probably go insane and quality suffers. Find a way to break up the tasks so that persons spend part of the time researching, part time proofing the other's work and part time writing. Helps with a better output. Sure, you could use software to "spin" the bios, but they would come out looking like crapola. That was why we used people and were happy with the results.
We did see a significant jump in our organic traffic, so for us it was worth it. You may take a look and decide not to, but wanted to put this option out there.
-
You aren't going to suffer a penalty from this. There really is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty", just the chance that you will be out-ranked. If you want to quantify the potential risk, just look at all the organic traffic to those bio pages on your site and determine what would happen were you to lose rankings for some percentage of them. My guess is that you won't lose rankings dramatically and, when you do, it will just be the 1 position supplanted by a now-even-better ranking from WebMD.
That being said, duplicate content is best if you can avoid it. If it is possible, find a way to modify the bios on-the-fly as they are syndicated. Make sure you include brand mentions in the opening paragraph (you could use a boilerplate sentence or two to start off each bio).
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
-
Unpublishing content question
Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles. We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions: 1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles? 2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?
Branding | | TheaterMania0 -
Pros/Cons on Where to Host Stores for Ecommerce Solution Provider (subdomain vs. throwaway domain, etc)
Hello! Does anyone have any experience with the pros/cons for where to host storefronts as an ecommerce solution provider. I'm looking for a recommendation on where to house the stores/websites people create with our software (think of us like a shopify/squarespace). What are the pros & cons of creating stores on the main domain name “brand.com” versus buying a new top level domain name who’s only purpose will be to hold all the subdomains, such as “mybrand.com”, or even “.my.brand.com”. store.brand.com <— subdomain our our primary domain
Branding | | andrewmeyer
store.my.brand.com <— subdomain of a subdomain
store.mybrand.com <— subdomain of a throw-away domain Weebly/Squarespace/Tictail go with the first option (store**.weebly.com** and store.squarespace.com). Shopify goes with the 3rd option (store.myshopify.com) Are there any advantages or disadvantages to one or the other? Am I missing any other options? Thanks in advance!0 -
Hosted content vs Dedicated website (for large piece of content)
There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL? To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad. We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc. This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits. How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains? Thanks in advance for your advice. Maëlle
Branding | | ESL_Education0 -
Tips For Promoting Content & Contacting Journalists
Hey, After months of working hard we have some great content on our website, and now seem to be getting into a flow of releasing content consistently. I think it's now time to shift a bit of focus onto getting more eyes lookng at it, and importantly the right eyes. Has anyone got any tips or advice? Kind Regards
Branding | | JonathanRolande0 -
Guest blogging & duplicate content
This feels like a question I should know the answer to and I'm a tad embarrassed to ask, but the part of my brain that gets tripped up by somewhat simple things sometimes, is begging to ask just to confirm my understanding. I want to make sure I have it right it prior to giving advice. When one guest blogs I assume that it is critical to create content that is original and unique to that one instance of the guest blog. That means, do not also put that post on your own blog and do not submit it to any other blogs for inclusion. This is both for duplicate content issues and also to respect and not put in jeopardy for duplicated content, the blog owner you are guesting for. Is this correct? Are there any scenarios in which there might be a deviation of this "rule"? Like some use of canonicals or anything else?
Branding | | gfiedel0 -
Content Marketing for E-Commerce Sites
Let's have a real discussion about content marketing for B2B and B2C e-commerce sites. As an SEO/inbound marketer (these days, I'm not sure what to call myself other than my first name), it's part of my job to keep a pulse on what's going on in the online marketing community. My daily routine starts with checking several sites for news/discussion (Moz, Inbound.org, SearchEngineLand, etc). Anyone actively involved in the community knows the word "content" appears in more articles than any other word (ok, maybe there a few others). Want to increase brand awareness? Generate content. Want to drive more traffic to your site? Generate content. Want to build quality links? Generate content. Want to discover the Higgs particle before the physicists? Generate content (and distribute to the right audience, so not to the chemists - ok maybe to the chemists, they're a related audience). Content, content, content, we're told! Yes I did see the Rand's WBF from a couple months back about content-less marketing, but frankly his suggestions fall under the traditional model of advertising and word-of-mouth. We're online marketers baby, we're expanding and changing the traditional model - with content! Enough of content marketing about content marketing. Let's see some content marketing for the small B2C, mom n' pop client who sells gardening tools. Let's see the amazing infographic you made for your local pizzeria client that drove traffic to their site. Let's see the Q+A discussion thread you identified and contributed to as means to display 'market leadership' in your niche of home air purifiers. Look, I love the idea of content marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Displaying market leadership by answering questions and offering something beneficial to your target audience should be the way to grow business (along with having a good product/service, I guess). But it's much easier said than done. And to be clear, I never expected otherwise. The motivation for this post was to start a discussion about real-world, applied content marketing, not content marketing about content marketing. Let the conversation begin.
Branding | | b40040400 -
Converting Site Content to Different Niche and in Different Language
Background STORY: I'm a wordpress theme designer, and i have a 3 years old wordpress-based site in english language with more than 100 post. Let's just called this site "olddomain.com" (generic brand name, didn't have keyword on it) Almost all of content are just showcase post and download link for my Free Wordpress Theme Download. So the site is lacking in terms of quality article content. I never doing any SEO work (keyword targeting,etc) for this "olddomain.com ", but the site backlinks is growing viral since the beginning, perhaps due to the nature of a "freebie" site. Using the OSE, it showed 12,850 Total Links from 349 Linking Root domain. Back when Y! Site Explorer still exist the number of linked domain is around 64,000+ links, and google webmaster tools show the number of 655,000+ Links. It's now has PageRank 5 (for almost a year) , with Home Page Authority 62/100 and Domain Authority 55/100. But in terms of traffic and revenue, the site is doing pretty bad. I only got less than 3000 visit per month. Revenue less than $10/month from adsense, and generated less than $1000 over the last 2 years from premium wordpress theme affiliate program. Some people told me that i have to add more article to attract traffic. but the thing is, i don't really good on writing english article, It's not my native language, so i can't really express my thought. I know i can outsource article writing, but i feel more comfortable and affordable if i write from my own mind. RECENT STORY: For the last 3 months i also learn more about SEO and internet marketing , and recently doing some local keyword research in my native language (Indonesian) with google keyword tools combine with SEOmoz keywords analysis. I found more than 100+ of Indonesian keywords in multi-niche with more than 3000+ Exact local search/month. And after using SEOmoz keyword analysis, almost all of them are in relatively low competition level under 40% . So The Potential is HUGE. MY IDEA: I want to create a new multi-niche informational content-rich website based on the keywords i found on my language. Something like about.com, squidoo, or hubpages. My question is : 1. Should i completely start that site in a "newdomain.com" completely from scratch (No Pagerank, Backlinks, PA, DA) ? or I just use my existing "olddomain.com" which already got the link advantage (Pagerank 5 with thousands of backlinks) and just recreate the site-structure and put the new article content on it, although it's on different niche and different language . 2. What's the effect for search engine if you changing your site content to different niche (from wordpress theme to Multi-niche Informational website) and also to a different language (english to indonesian) Best Regards,
Branding | | thefaizal
Faizal0 -
Promoting Great Content
Say I've just created some great content on my site, what does the forum think the best way of promoting this content via. social would be? e.g. Paid stumbles, tweets, posting on reddit? We've created some good content in the past, but never really been able to drive traffic to it through social sites and networking with a great deal of success.
Branding | | PeterAlexLeigh0