Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Block Quotes and Citations for duplicate content
-
I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way. This is what I read:
http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo
So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content? I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit. It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales. I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer.
I want to do this for a contact lens site. I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions. Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well.
Would this be the best method? Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it? On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own.
Cheers,
Vinnie
-
Does anyone else have anything to add? I'd love to see a few examples of pages that make use of the tags and how they are doing in the search engines. I certainly understand if you don't want to share your specific pages though.
-
Thanks for the input. I agree with you about the strength of the site, as well as the pages. I might give it a try on a small sample of pages and see if it helps conversions or impacts SEO at all.
Vinnie
-
There is no set hard and fast rules so this is simply my opinion.
Google is pretty lenient if the percentage of content you have copied is low compared to the rest of your page.
Duplication issues can also be overcome if you have other good SEO trust signals i.e. good back links, established domain, unique content etc. I assume this is why Rotten Tomatoes get away with duplication issues as they have an established brand.
As long as you are citing the original source and the duplicated content is not a large percentage of your page then you should be ok.
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, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?
I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this: <a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href="" Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
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 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0