Duplicate Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, is it a problem?
-
Hi,
If i use same terms of use and privacy policy content across my websites, does it amounts to duplicate content issues? Does it affect my websites in any manner?
Regards
-
Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors. If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal.
This is true for most SEO factors. If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.
-
You can do almost anything you wish on a "noindex" tagged page. You are telling the search engine bot to exclude the page from the search index, so the page should not affect your ranking.
The reason your site's # of pages is a factor, is your overall site is viewed as a whole. If you have a basic site with 10 pages, and there is a problem with 1 of the pages having duplicate content, then 10% of your site is affected, and this can impact how the search engine views your site. If your site hosted a forums with 10k pages, then that 1 page would represent 0.001 of your site, so the impact would not have any real effect.
-
Thanks for the helpful reply Alan! Can you please explain this - "If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact". How duplicate content issues vary between small and big sites? I was under the impression that number of pages do not have any influence in duplicate content.
Is it okay to use the same privacy policy and terms of use across different websites as long as i noindex,follow them?
-
How big is your site? If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact. But in reality, I expect your site is not primarily made up of keyword phrases that either of those pages would be optimized for, and that you have more than a few pages. If so, any "negative" aspect would not be severe.
Having said that, it really is best to just use a robots meta tag set to noindex,follow (my preference instead of blocking completely in the robots.txt file.
-
Thanks for the reply Ryan! But if i don't block it via robots.txt file or noindex tag, will it affect my site negatively? I mean the overall site
-
I would recommend blocking pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, legal, etc. It is unlikely these pages would ever bring traffic to your site. Even if they did, it is not going to be the quality traffic you desire.
In robots.txt you can add
Disallow: /pages/privacy/
substitute your local path for /pages/privacy/
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
-
How do I use meta descriptions properly?
Hi there, I am starting to write a blog and I wanted to know, how to write meta descriptions correctly? I have been reading a lot about this subject lately and I found very different opinions in terms of length. Could you give me some advise about this? Thank you!!
Content Development | | lucywrites1 -
Product descriptions, when do they become classed as duplicate content, how different do they have to be?
I look after 3 sites which have a lot of crossover on products. We have 1000s of products and I've made it a requirement that we give each it's on description on each of the sites. This sounds like the right thing to but it's very hard for our content writers to write three different versions descriptions, especially when we have variations on the products so potentially writing unique product descriptions for 4-5 very similar products on three separate sites. We've worked very hard to create unique content deep through the site on all categories, subcategories and tag combinations and along with the other SEO work we've done over the last couple of years is producing great results. My question is now far do we have to go? I'm busy writing some product descriptions for a 3rd party site for some of our products, the easy thing to do is just copy and paste but I want Google to see the descriptions as unique. Whilst all SEO advice will say 'write unique descriptions' from a practical point of view this isn't especially useful as there doesn't really seem to be much guidance on how different they need to be. I gather we can't just move around the paragraphs or jumble up sentences a bit but it is easier to work from a description and change it than it is to start from a blank slate (our products range form being very interesting and unique, to quite everyday so sometimes tough to create varied unique content for). Does anyone know of any guidance or evidence of just how clever the Google algorithm is and how close content has to be before it becomes classed as the same or similar? Thanks Pete
Content Development | | PeterLeatherland0 -
Use old content from Archive
Hello all, I just were looking on Archive.org and though what if i use the content from a really old website thats already been un-indexed. Could i just use this content on my new website and will it not be duplicate content? Thank you for your comment! Kind regards,
Content Development | | MennoO0 -
Use Of H1 Tags
I just have a quick question. I have seen a few people mention that the use of more than 1 H1 tag has little bearing on things. I am trying to sort out a site for a friend and it has 2 H1 tags. My issue is that it is ranking for a quite competitive keyword (don't know how as the whole site layout is a total mess) but in my efforts to clean up the site I am wondering if I should actually reduce the No of H1 Tags to 1 or leave 'as is' for fear of breaking something. Thanks Paul
Content Development | | propertyhunter0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i have a serious problem. I work in joomla and sometimes it can be annoying. When you set up a category, you need to give it a name and maybe this is a huge error on my part as i did not really think about the names beforehand. The situation i have now is, all my sections are in front page mode, but because you have to name the categories in order to write articles, i am now left with a load of blog sections such as http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news Now i have a main section called Benidorm news so i have duplicate sections, i want to know if i can redirect the http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news to go to the main benidorm section or if there is a better way of doing it. i have left this blod layout the way it is to show you, but the others i just have it where it shows the title and then goes to the article. I work in k2 and would be grateful if anyone can let me know the solution to this as semoz is showing that i have many duplicate titles and content many thanks
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Article Distribution - Duplicate content or not?
Many SEO's disagree on this subject so I wanted to see what everyone thinks. Producing an article and then distributing to multiple article directories. In the eyes of Google is this considered spam(duplicate content) or it is not? As I understand unique content is good SEO. However, I also understand that visibility of the content on multiple sites is very important. What do youthink?
Content Development | | DmitryP0 -
Duplicate content?
I am not understanding this - I see a duplicate content warning. When I look into it I see these two urls: http;//search-engine-upgrade.com http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp (NOT a blog)
Content Development | | dcmike0 -
Separating words in URLS using hyphens vs. "no separator"
Does it matter if I use hyphens in URL versus. "no separation". Ex www.mysite.com/someproducts or
Content Development | | clolsen
www.mysite.com/SomeProducts vs.
www.mysite.com/some-products The last is perhaps more readable by humans, but does it make any SEO difference using one or the other?1