Duplicate content. Competing for rank.
-
Scenario:
An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy.
Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google?
Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content?
Thank you.
-
Q1: Easier said than done, but definitely worth the time to rewrite the "chunks," especially if they are descriptions. I can see if it's something like safety information, where you'd actually want it to be known it's coming from a trusted source. But, descriptions should be rewritable. If not, you probably don't want to pass the copy off as your own, so best to keep it separate and say something like "site XYZ has this to say..."
Also, if it can't be rewritten, gauge how much content is unique to each page, and consider what else can be written about the cars to help balance out the ratio of unique to copied content.
Q2: Make sure the dealer's website has self-referencing canonicals if that's the original source of the information.
-
Q2: If the "popular car listing website" has better domain authority, domain age etc. than the "dealer's website", then it could be an issue because Google sees the other website as more authoritative. However, date of publication is also important so if you posted it first on your website then there should be a less risk. Anyway, I'd recommend to change the text a bit for every website if possible. Or you can add some more multimedia content to the main page to make it different and more preferred.
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
-
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Penalized for Duplicate Page Content?
I have some high priority notices regarding duplicate page content on my website www.3000doorhangers.com Most of the pages listed here are on our sample pages: http://www.3000doorhangers.com/home/door-hanger-pricing/door-hanger-design-samples/ On the left side of our page you can go through the different categories. Most of the category pages have similar text. We mainly just changed the industry on each page. Is this something that google would penalize us for? Should I go through all the pages and use completely unique text for each page? Any suggestions would be helpful Thanks! Andrea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Same content pages in different versions of Google - is it duplicate>
Here's my issue I have the same page twice for content but on different url for the country, for example: www.example.com/gb/page/ and www.example.com/us/page So one for USA and one for Great Britain. Or it could be a subdomain gb. or us. etc. Now is it duplicate content is US version indexes the page and UK indexes other page (same content different url), the UK search engine will only see the UK page and the US the us page, different urls but same content. Is this bad for the panda update? or does this get away with it? People suggest it is ok and good for localised search for an international website - im not so sure. Really appreciate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Duplicate content resulting from js redirect?
I recently created a cname (e.g. m.client-site .com) and added some js (supplied by mobile site vendor to the head which is designed to detect if the user agent is a mobi device or not. This is part of the js: var CurrentUrl = location.href var noredirect = document.location.search; if (noredirect.indexOf("no_redirect=true") < 0){ if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Android.*Mobile|webOS|Window Now... Webmaster Tools is indicating 2 url versions for each page on the site - for example: 1.) /content-page.html 2.) /content-page.html?no_redirect=true and resulting in duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. I am not quite adept enough at either js or htaccess to really grasp what's going on here... so an explanation of why this is occurring and how to deal with it would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
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 -
How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry) Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example) Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword. These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc) Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure 🙂 So - to questions/thoughts. 1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally. 2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them) 3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant? 4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that? I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Capote0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0