Is this dangerous (a content question)
-
Hi
I am building a new shop with unique products but I also want to offer tips and articles on the same topic as the products (fishing). I think if was to add the articles and advice one piece at a time it would look very empty and give little reason to come back very often.
The plan, therefore, is to launch the site pulling articles from a number of article websites - with the site's permission. Obviously this would be 100% duplicate content but it would make the user experience much better and offer added value to my site as people are likely to keep returning even when not in the mood to purchase anything; it also offers the potential for people to email links to friends etc. note: over time we will be adding more unique content and slowly turning off the pulled articled.
Anyway, from an seo point of view I know the duplicate content would harm the site but if I was to tell google not to index the directory and block it from even crawling the directory would it still know there is duplicate content on the site and apply the penalty to the non duplicate pages? I'm guessing no but always worth a second opinion.
Thanks
Carl
-
Hi Carl,
Several large publications do this sort of thing already, but they do have a lot of content of their own to back the duplicate / blocked content up. The most large-scale example of this is newspapers that syndicate content from other papers, often internationally. I was the SEO on a project like this for a large UK paper, and we blocked the duplicated content's subfolder via robots.txt so that the newspaper was not re-publishing indexable content from its international sister.
Your other option is to use the canonical tag to point back to the original version of the content.
Syndication shouldn't be harmful, and if you were doing this with a lot of content on the site to begin with, it would be normal and fine. What worries me is Google seeing a new site where there is literally no content (to begin with) and a large, blocked section. After the Panda update, it's pretty important to show a resource-heavy website, even if the site's purpose is filled without content. For instance, a property search engine I worked on saw a huge Panda penalty because all of their articles were on an artlce subdomain, not on the same subdomain as the "money" part of their site. We had to move the articles over to the main site.
It's not possible for me to say exactly what will happen if you go ahead with this, but I must advise that you should be building out your unique content both before launch, and quickly post-launch. It's vital that unique, indexable content be live on the site for it to perform well, even for commercial queries that don't rely on a site having articles.
Cheers,
Jane
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
-
Identify hidden content + Question of impact
I have a client that had a web agency which systematically implemented hidden content. Is there a tool that will compare source content vs what is readable on from the browser? Otherwise, can you recommend articles that focus on doing this? What are the impact on hidden content these days? Another client had hidden content on the first page and when we took over them they were ranking nr 2 with the home page on their brand name (nr 1 with a sub page). We have checked the link profile with Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz and nothing spammy comes up so I doubt it is Penguin related.
Technical SEO | | OscarSE0 -
Duplicate Content - Different URLs and Content on each
Seeing a lot of duplicate content instances of seemingly unrelated pages. For instance, http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-bluetooth-speakers.html?from=topnav3 is being tracked as a duplicate of http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-planners-diaries.html?resultsperpg=viewall. Does anyone else see this issue? Is there a solution anyone is aware of?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Canonical question
I have at least three duplicate main pages on my website: www.augustbullocklaw.com www.augustbullocklaw.com/index augustbullocklaw.com I want the first one, www.augustbullocklaw.com to be the main page. I put this code on the index page and uploaded it to my site: http://www.augustbullocklaw.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" /> This code now appears on all three pages shown above. Did I do this correctly? I surmise that www.augustbullocklaw.com is pointing to itself. Is that ok? I don't know how to take the cononical code off the page that is the page I want to be the main page. (I don't know how to remove it from www.augustbullocklaw.com, but leave it on www.augustbullocklaw.com/index and augustbullocklaw.com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | Augster990 -
Newbie Duplicate Title Question
We recently update our website with DNN 6. Once the upgrade was done, I kept recieving log in links on my duplicate title and duplicate content error reports. Is anyone familiar with how to stop these links from showing up? Example of link: http://www.faisongroup.com/Login/tabid/750/Default.aspx?returnurl=%2F Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | VeronicaCFowler0 -
Summarize your question.Sitemap blocking or not blocking that is the question?
Hi from wet & overcast wetherby UK 😞 Ones question is this... " Is the sitemap plus boxes blocking bots ie they cant pass on this page http://www.langleys.com/Site-Map.aspx " Its just the + boxes that concern me, i remeber reading somewherte javascript nav can be toxic. Is there a way to test javascript nav set ups and see if they block bots or not? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Redirect question
I would like to redirect http://example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/ Is the code below correct ? RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}^example.comRewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Pages not ranking - Linkbuilding Question
It has been about 3 months since we made some new pages, with new, unique copy, but alot of pages (even though they have been indexed) are not ranking in the SERPS I tested it by taking a long snippet of the unique copy form the page and searching for it on Google. Also I checked the ranking using http://arizonawebdevelopment.com/google-page-rank
Technical SEO | | Impact-201555
Which may no be accurate, I know, but would give some indication. The interesting thing was that for the unique copy snippets, sometimes a different page of our site, many times the home page, shows up in the SERP'sSo my questions are: Is there some issue / penalty / sandbox deal with the pages that are not indexed? How can we check that? Or has it just not been enough time? Could there be any duplicate copy issue going on? Shouldn't be, as they are all well written, completely unique copy. How can we check that? Flickr image details - Some of the pages display the same set of images from flickr. The details (filenames, alt info, titles) are getting pulled form flickr and can be seen on the source code. Its a pretty large block of words, which is the same on multiple pages, and uses alot of keywords. Could this be an issue considered duplication or keyword stuffing, causing this. If you think so , we will remove it right away. And then when do we do to improve re-indexing? The reason I started this was because we have a few good opportunities right now for links, and I was wondering what pages we should link to and try to build rankings for. I was thinking about pointing one to /cast-bronze-plaques, but the page is not ranking. The home page, obviously is the oldest page, and ranked the best. The cast bronze plaques page is very new. Would linking to pages that are not ranking well be a good idea? Would it help them to get indexed / ranking? Or would it be better to link to the pages that are already indexed / ranking? If you link to a page that does not seem to be indexed, will it help the domains link profile? Will the link juice still flow through the site0