Copying my content
-
Hi there,
I run a successful e-commerce website, which the product pages are rich with content linking to other products etc, one of our retailers who sell our products I just noticed copied and pasted the content I have written for these product pages leaving in all the links, which it turn are linking back to my product pages, is this a good thing? or should I make that retailer put in canonical tags?
Thanks for any help
-
Regarding your last point I am sure I recently watched a WBF were Rand had mentioned this was a good way of getting backlinks, I did question this myself when I heard this.
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your feedback.
This is becoming more of an issue for me, as we have literraly hundreds of online retailers selling our products, however they do not have the resource in creating new content for these product pages and I certainly don't for hundreds of different websites.
If I could persuade these retailers to put canonical and point it to my product pages would this benefit my SERPs?
-
Going to have to agree with Alan here. I've worked on a lot of ecommerce sites and as the categories fill up with competitors all using the same text it quickly becomes an issue of duplicate content and authorial ownership. What I've seen in the past is cost-sharing, where the manufacturer and the retailer will combine monies to hire authors to make retailer-specific content for those products. In part it depends on the category as well; something like clothing can have just about any old description, but something like a calculator is pretty hard to make sexy.
The links are another question entirely; in a way I don't see how they can do anything but be neutral, or helpful to you right now. It certainly establishes you as the originator of the content too.
-
You're facing one of the most challenging issues e-commerce sites face - and here's what I recommend to manufacturers -
Using canonical references might be beneficial to your site, however it leaves retailers unable to rank for those products. So every retail site that carries your products should have their own unique version of content - completely unique descriptions. This can be a challenge when there are a lot of products in the database, and of course would not apply to technical specifications within product detail pages, however it's vital for everyone's long term success to get the descriptive text to be truly unique. To the point where the majority of content on each product detail page that is unique outweighs the portion copied (product name, technical specifications, category assigned, etc.).
Whether YOU provide that unique content (and thus control the message), or require that your retailers do the heavy lifting is up to you to decide.
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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Duplicate content warning for a hierarchy structure?
I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
Technical SEO | | westsaddle
The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!0 -
H1 Headers and Unique Content
Should my H1 header contain the same keywords in the same order, verbatim as my SEO title or some variation of them? Or does it matter?
Technical SEO | | keeot0 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
What could be the cause of this duplicate content error?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this? IUJvfZE.png
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson1 -
Does Google know what footer content is?
We plan to do away with fixed footer content and make, for the most part, the content in the traditional footer area unique just like the 'main' part of the content. This begs the question, do Google know what is footer content as opposed to main on page content?
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0