Noindex duplicate content penalty?
-
We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit.
Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site.
In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.
-
Yes, I agree the ideal solution would be to make the content unique, however all being well, I will have about 20,000 threads and 50,000 posts added in a month. The other main reason for doing is it the forum script creates users as assigns posts to them so the forum will also seem to have about 5,000 active users.
Removing the duplicate content would be easy enough, can run an sql query and remove all posts before x date,
-
Do you really want to double your work? Parse and later remove forums content?
I think will be much better rewrite yahoo answers, of course it need more time and resources, but your content will be unique. And you've got search traffic much faster. It's ease to find cheap rewrites, who fill your forum very fast.
-
Maybe what you should do is add the rel="canonical" attribute on your page/thread to the corresponding Yahoo answers page. This will certainly tell Google who the "original owner" is. If you want to block from search engines also, keep the noindex and also block Googlebot in robots.txt for that sub directory.
-
Sorry, just thought of something else....
Instead of the no index would blocking google from the /forum/ directory in htaccess be even better? I'm guessing that it would. With noindex we are telling Google not to index the content but it is still reading it. With a block we are not even showing Google the bad content in the first place so it doesn't know there is any duplicate 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/Similar Pages
Hello, I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I'm working on a site and I'm having some issues with its structure causing duplicate content. The first issue is that the search pages will show up as duplicates.
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
A search for new inventory may be new.aspx
The duplicate may be something like new.aspx=page1, or something like that and so on. The second issue is with inventory. When new inventory gets put into the stock of the store, a new page for that item will be populated with duplicate content. There appears to be no canonical source for that page. How can I fix both of these? Thanks!0 -
How do I deal with Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm trying SEOMOZ and its saying that i've got loads of duplicate content. We provide phone numbers for cities all over the world, so have pages like this... https://www.keshercommunications.com/Romaniavoipnumbers.html https://www.keshercommunications.com/Icelandvoipnumbers.html etc etc. One for every country. The question is, how do I create pages for each one without it showing up as duplicate content? Each page is generated by the server, but Its impossible to write unique text for each one. Also, the competition seem to have done the same but google is listing all their pages when you search for 'DID Numbers. Look for DIDWW or MyDivert.
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
How to prevent duplicate content at a calendar page
Hi, I've a calender page which changes every day. The main url is
Technical SEO | | GeorgFranz
/calendar For every day, there is another url: /calendar/2012/09/12
/calendar/2012/09/13
/calendar/2012/09/14 So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page
/calendar/2012/09/13
will be shown at
/calendar So, it's duplicate content. What to do in this situation? a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to /calendar/2012/09/14) b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?) c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day... Any ideas or other suggestions? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
Duplicate content, how to solve?
I have about 400 errors about duplicate content on my seomoz dashboard. However I have no idea how to solve this, I have 2 main scenarios of duplication in my site: Scenario 1: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?name=64MB+SDRAM+DIMM+MEMORY+MODULE&sku=&price%5Bfrom%5D=&price%5Bto%5D=&category= 3 products with the same title, but different product models, as you can note is has the same price as well. Some printers use a different memory product module. So I just cant delete 2 products. Scenario 2: toners http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-73 http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-75 In this scenario, products have a different title but the same price. Again, in this scenario the 2 products are different. Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Duplicate Content from Google URL Builder
Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?
Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion0 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Is this considered as duplicate content?
One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110