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
-
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
I have duplicate content but // are causing them
I have 3 pages duplicated just by a / Example: https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**//**
Technical SEO | | Renalynd
https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**/** What would cause this?? And how would I fix it? Thanks! Rena0 -
Duplicate content by php id,page=... problem
Hi dear friends! How can i resolve this duplicate problem with edit the php code file? My trouble is google find that : http://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=booking&act=send_booking&ID=38 and http://vietnamfoodtour.com/.....booking.html are different page, but they are one but google indexed both of them. And the Duplcate content is raised 😞 how can i notice to google that they are one?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
How much to change to avoid duplicate content?
Working on a site for a dentist. They have a long list of services that they want us to flesh out with text. They provided a bullet list of services, we're trying to get 1 to 2 paragraphs of text for each. Obviously, we're not going to write this off the top of our heads. We're pulling text from other sources and trying to rework. The question is, how much rephrasing do we have to do to avoid a duplicate content penalty? Do we make sure there are changes per paragraph, sentence, or phrase? Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | ericmccarty0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
A site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues.
A reasonably large ecommerce site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues. On 4 or 5 keyword domains related to site content the owners simply duplicated the home page with category links pushing visitors to the category pages of the main site. There was no canonical URL instruction, so have set preferred url via webmaster tools but now need to code this into the website itself. For a reasonably large ecommerce site, how would you approach that particular nest of troubles. That's even before we get to grips with the on page duplication and wrong keywords!
Technical SEO | | SkiBum0 -
We are still seeing duplicate content on SEOmoz even though we have marked those pages as "noindex, follow." Any ideas why?
We have many pages on our website that have been set to "no index, follow." However, SEOmoz is indexing them as duplicate content. Why is that?
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle0