Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
-
Hey Everyone,
I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content.
Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet.
The Issue
Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc).
Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
-
Great pleasure - good luck with it all!
-
Great response Nigel and thank you so much for your insight!
-
Hi imjonny
I'm glad you have asked around to be honest. Like I said, I would.
You are right that even if you canonicalize ultimately Google will decide whether to rank a page it deems to be important and can ignore the canonicalization. If the canonical isn't bona fide then it could call in to doubt the other canonicals on your site which would be a strong negative signal for SEO and lead to a drop in trust.
So - it depends on what you want to rank for.
Let's say you have Product A on site A and you then have an equivalent checkout page on site B. Then you can't try and rank for the term Product A because it just isn't going to happen. We've already said that we will need to canonicalize that page anyway to the equivalent page on site A.
The only thing you can hope to do is rank for 'Delivery Options', 'Branded Delivery' The Big 'Delivery Option Site'
What you can't do is try and rank for the product names, It will be impossible. But then why would you want to? Surely the important thing is to maintain rank for site A's products with site B being more of a slave site - solely functional.
Ultimately you would be canonicalizing the product pages not the whole site so maybe there are other pages that you can add. Maintenance, Technology, How to etc But frankly they would suit Site A anyway because if I am buying a product I want as much info as possible before purchase, not on the delivery page.
Oh and don't create branded content for site B because once again you will crave up site A.
I know it's a big conundrum but I haven't seen anything like you are trying to do so can only generalise on best practice.
I hope that helps!
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Nigel,
I got some more responses from other sources and it seems like duplicating a new site IS a bad idea.
Let's say we canonical to website A so that Google knows that the main page is on site A. Would Website B have chances to index & rank? I've heard that canonical is just a signal to Google. Google will ultimately determine which page they will want to show even if the canonical is there. Is this true?
-
The bigger the site the bigger the potential loss. No SEO in my honest opinion would snaction what you are thinking no matter how big the site is.
Like I said - cast the question wider than here. It's shame that other SEOs haven't come on to help you with your thinking.
-
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for the response again! I understand that you may have had sites that had shared content, but what was the scale of these websites? Do you think if Website A was a huge authority that this issue won't be as big of a deal?
We're talking millions of sessions per month.
-
Hi
I have had sites myself with shared content and the end result was that neither of them ranked at all. They were set up in a pre-Penguin world (before 2011) and when the update really cut in September 2012 I lost 60% of my traffic in one day.
I have also worked on many sites who shared content across their own pages resulting in the same collapse in SERPS - You can read about the biggest mistake that website owners make here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
In certain circumstances, you can share others' content by way of syndication. You'll see it on MOZ occasionally. They will have produced a great article and at a later date will share it across some other article sites as the authority will have been established as a MOZ article. Note that these are small'ish articles, not whole sites.
What you are talking about is basically, willingly, creating a duplicate site to site A. If you do that your rankings on site A will fall and site B will never gain any rank at all if the content pages are duplicates.
Yes, a competitor could damage your site if they were so inclined. Negative SEO is the practice of sharing your content to a number of sources thereby creating mass duplication. While Google should recognise yours as the original that is rarely the the case.
Duplicate content is at the very core of SEO. If someone is telling you differently then they are wrong.
However, it is your website and I would completely agree with your strategy of playing devil's advocate. If it was my site I would want as much corroboration as possible. So go and ask other SEOs but make damn sure they know what they are talking about and it isn't a 'bloke down the pub! because it can cost you hugely.
We probably lost £½m through our own naivete - never again!
Regards Nigel
-
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for the response again! I have a few questions:
- Why do you think I will destroy Site A? If that logic is true, theoretically, wouldn't you be able to copy someones site 100% and cause it to get destroyed?
- Have you seen any examples of this before?
I don't mean to neglect your advice, I'm just hearing different things from different people and need an accurate response in order to make the right decision.
-
If you use Website A content then you must canonicalize otherwise you will destroy the site (A). If you want B to rank independently then it MUST have original content.
This is how it works I'm afraid. Get help from a copywriter, or a few if that helps keep the cost down,
Regards
Nigel
-
Hey Nigel,
Thanks for your answer! Just to give some reference, Website A is currently up and has been up for a long time. It is getting A LOT of traffic and we don't want to risk anything on website A which is ranking REALLY well. Also, Website B is being made because of legal issues (can't really get into it) but it's best if we keep them as separate entities.
Because we're looking at scale for 1000s of pages to rewrite content, that doesn't seem like an option. And yes, we will be pulling all of the content from Website A to Website B.
Is the only solution to create completely new content for Website B? Will I face any issues with Website A at all whichever strategy I choose?
-
Hi imjonny
You are going to have a major problem trying to get these two sites listed at all in my opinion.
1. You are creating a multi-brand/store website in website A with menus reviews and about the stores & brands.
2. When someone clicks the brand delivery on website A they will be directed to site B. - presumably, because site B handles all of the shipping and checkout processes.If site B pulls the information from site A then you will kill both sites. I presume when you say 'pull' you mean it will also have that information on the pages?
So you are creating an unindexable monster that no amount of canonicalization, redirecting or iframe manipulation will help.
Presumably, you need to rank for site A but that is not possible if you are pulling content into site B. The only sensible thing I can think of is.
1. Canonicalize 'Store 1' on Site B to the equivalent store page on Site A. So store 1 on Site B effectively does not exist at all.
2. Call Store B - 'Brand Delivery' and write acres of content about delivering brands on the home page and a load of supporting pages. You just won't rank for anything on the second site apart from 'Brand Delivery' and any contextually similar words.
It's a weird way of setting stuff up. If I were shopping on a site I would not want to go to a different site to check out. You will have two sites to manage presumably with the same NAP - (site ownership and address) as well so that will not help.
The only way is to keep the two sites content mutually exclusive and use canonicals which of course can be done between different URLs.
If it was me I would keep site A and ditch the B idea but ho hum!
Kind Regards
Nigel
-
Unfortunately, there is no way around it
I think, imo, the best option is to just use the same domain, but that is really something we aren't able to do.
iframe sounds interesting, but we do still want the content (at least the menu of products) indexed.
Changing the content is also out of the question. Way too hard to scale with how many we would have to change.
-
Hey. If you rel=canonical I don't see how these pages would rank anymore. You're basically telling google that the other pages are the better ones. Is there no going around the duplicate content? This is a really strange / problematic situation.
I think your best bet is either using some sort of iframe if that's an option (it doesn't necessarily need to look bad). Or do your best to change content.
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
-
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Duplicate Content Error because of passed through variables
Hi everyone... When getting our weekly crawl of our site from SEOMoz, we are getting errors for duplicate content. We generate pages dynamically based on variables we carry through the URL's, like: http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp
http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php?top=true ie, ?top=true is the variable being passed through. We are a large site (approx 7000 pages) so obviously we are getting many of these duplicate content errors in the SEOMoz report. Question: Are the search engines also penalizing for duplicate content based on variables being passed through? Thanks!0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?
Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse. We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site. I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi. I am getting error of having duplicate content on my website and pages its showing there are: www.mysitename.com www.mysitename.com/index.html As my best knowledge it only one page, I know this can be solved with some conical tag used in header, but do not know how. Can anyone please tell me about that code or any other way to get this solved. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetraffic0 -
Nuanced duplicate content problem.
Hi guys, I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something. Situation: The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B. Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance. Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword. Plan: New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so... Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naymark.biz0