Duplicate Content from Multiple Sources Cross-Domain
-
Hi Moz Community,
We have a client who is legitimately repurposing, or scraping, content from site A to site B. I looked into it and Google recommends the cross-domain rel=canonical tag below:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
The issue is it is not a one to one situation. In fact site B will have several pages of content from site A all on one URL. Below is an example of what they are trying to accomplish.
EX - www.siteB.com/apples-and-oranges is made up of content from www.siteA.com/apples & www.siteB.com/oranges
So with that said, are we still in fear of getting hit for duplicate content? Should we add multiple rel=canonical tags to reflect both pages? What should be our course of action.
-
Hi Kurt,
Multiple canonicals won't work. I believe our own Dr. Pete did some testing on this a couple years ago, and the results didn't pan out.
It there isn't original content on the page, you have a couple of options. First of all you could de-index the page by adding a meta NOINDEX tag. A second option would be use the cross-domain canoncical to the most prominent choice (page A or page B) typically whatever is closer to the top of the page.
If you have the opportunity to add unique content to the page, this might solve your problem. A couple hundred words could make the content unique and the page might have a chance of ranking on it's own and you wouldn't need to worry about canonicalization.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I wouldnt worry about duplicate issues too much unless its on the same domain. It would be my last thing to worry about, probably after fixing the new site. I have done it before on some projects so i understand how annoying this is.
Im wondering why he would want to put the same piece of content on SiteB on 2 separate pieces though...
You would want to put rel=canonical on the pages that have the content like the siteB content page pointing to the siteB mixed content
It's a bit vague but I hope I understood your situation correctly.
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
-
Content incorrectly being duplicated on microsite
So bear with me here as this is probably a technical issue and i am not that technical. We have a microsite for one of our partner organisations and recently we have detected that content from our main site appearing in the URLs for the microsite - both in search results and then when you click through to the SERP. However, this content does not exist on the actual website at all. Anyone have a possible explanation for this? I have tried searching the web but nothing. I assume there is something in the set up of the microsite that is associating it with the content on the main site.
Technical SEO | | Discovery_SA0 -
Duplicate homepage content across multiple websites
Hi, I work for a company that runs 30+ membership based websites on separate domains and across multiple markets. The homepage for each site contains a section of content that highlights the site benefits and features. While each website serves a different market/niche, this section of content is essentially the same as each website offers the same benefits and features. What is the best way to avoid duplicate content issues while still being able to show the same section of content across 30+ sites? This particular section of content isn't valuable from an SEO perspective, but the rest of the content on that page is. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Duplicate Footer Content
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page. What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BigStereo0 -
Testing for duplicate content and title tags
Hi there, I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please? Thanks, Claire
Technical SEO | | SEOvet0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Avoiding duplicate content/same pages
hi I have been checking through all the Q and A but i i'm still not sure how you get http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html to be just http://www.domain.co.uk/? Do you add canonical to the index page to point to the page you prefer and then add a 301 redirect? thanks
Technical SEO | | challen0