Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
-
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice?
Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)?
Thanks
-
I usually instruct affiliate managers to write their own company bio and/or product descriptions for affiliates to use. Treat every single piece of content on your site as if it were an asset, because it is.
You can have 2,000 affiliates linking to you (though their links should probably be nofollowed) from within the same company bio or product description as long as that is not ALSO the same company bio or product description you use on your site. If they all want to share content that's their problem. Just don't let them share YOUR content.
-
Well a trackback is to avoid duplicate content penalties for an external site with the same content.
A canonical is internal to your site. So if you want to have two pages with the same url and avoid duplication and still pass link juice you would use a rel=canonical tag.
This should clear it up for you as it did for me : )
-
So it's for the affiliate to implement the canonical as we're the originating source?
-
Definitely** do something, you do not want duplicate content.** You can always trackback to the original content or use a rel=canonical tag.
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
-
Old content with trailing `/` - What should be my new approach?
Dear team Moz, I'm investigating SEO issues for the site that dropped rankings over a period of 4-6 months; after conversion from old platform (xenForo) to new custom developed platform. The old version of the site was a simple xenForo based forum; with threads having standard url structure as like www.domain.com/threads/thread-title.{thread_id}/. Notice the trailing slash. We chose to keep the URLs intact during conversion to new platform; however the site still lost rankings. I'm sure there could be multiple reasons for it - but I wish to know if I should adjust the URLs - 1. By 301 redirecting all the URLs with trailing / to the URLs without /. 2. Leave the URLs as they were. I must also mention that the new site has several new sections; and the old forum is just one part of it. The rest of the site follows URLs without trailing / - as it's the recommended URL structure by Google. I'd really appreciate your suggestions on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaustubhKatdare0 -
Is writing good content the best SEO?
Hi, After reading Mr. Shepard's amazing article on the 7 concepts of advanced on-page SEO (https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts), I decided to share my own experience in hopes of helping others. I started doing legal SEO back in 2013. At the time I really didn't know much about SEO. My first client (my brother) had recently left the D.A.'s office to become a criminal defense attorney. I told him to write content for the following areas: domestic violence, sex crimes, and homicide. He finished his first content piece on domestic violence and I was not impressed. It seemed too unique, individualized, and lacked the "generic" feel that many of the currently ranking pages had. Please note that I don't mean "generic" in a negative way. I just mean that his content regarding domestic violence felt too personalized. Granted, his "personalized" approach came from a Deputy D.A. with over 13 years handling domestic violence, sex crimes, and murder cases. I was inclined to re-write his content, but lacking any experience in criminal law I really had no choice but to use it. IMPORTANT: Please note that I barely knew any SEO at the time (I hadn't even yet discovered MOZ), and my brother knew, and continues to know, absolutely nothing about SEO. He simply wrote the content from the perspective of an attorney who had spent the better part of 13 years handling these types of cases. The result? Google: "Los Angeles domestic violence lawyer/attorney", "Los Angeles sex crimes lawyer/attorney", and "Los Angeles homicide attorney." They have held those spots consistently since being published. I know that MANY other factors contribute to the success of content, but at the time I published them we had few links and very little "technical SEO." Unfortunately, I started learning "SEO" and applied standard SEO techniques to future content. The result? Never as good as the articles that were written with no SEO in mind. My purpose in writing this is to help anyone about to tackle a new project or revamp an existing site. Before getting too caught up in the keywords, H tags, and all the other stuff I seem to worry too much about, simply ask yourself - "is this great content?" Thanks again to the MOZ team for the great advice they have shared over the years. Honestly, I think I sometimes become overly reliant on SEO b/c it seems easier than taking the time to write a great piece of content. P.s. Any "SEO" stuff you see on the above-mentioned pages was done by me after the pages ranked well. P.p.s. I don't mean to imply that the above-mentioned pages are perfect, because they are not. My point is that content can rank well even without any emphasis on SEO, as long as the person writing it knows about the subject and takes the time to write something that readers find useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14403 -
Use Nonindex or Canonical on product tags of a e-commerce site
I run a e-commerce site and we have many product tags. These product tags come up as "Duplicate Page Content" when Moz does it's crawl. I was wondering if I should use Nonindex or Canonical? The tags all go to the same product when used so I figure I would just nonindex them but was wondering what's the best for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EmmettButler1 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Where to find a trusted, SEO strategist for real estate company web site?
I addition to running a small web development company and thus having some background to SEO/inbound marketing, I also own a real estate web site at www.nhfinehomes.com. Last year, I had the site recoded with many SEO improvements in mind. The result was a significant boost in traffic/leads and more pages being indexed. One of the challenge with real estate sites is that all my competitors have the same content (house listings) via the IDX feed so the challenge is to try to shape the pages to be a little different. My question is where do I go from here? I'm not sure where to best focus my efforts for maximum improvement. My biggest competitor has tons more links, some of which are just not realistic for a small firm like mine. Is content creation the next step to push out on a Wordpress blog with better internal linking? In Google Analytics, I see tons of keyword phrases that I have low rankings for and wonder if some optimized content could help boost those? What I would like to find is a TRUSTED, proven consultant with PROVEN real estate SEO experience that could take a look at my site, my competition and honestly tell me what it would take to improve so I can better determine how big a nut this is to crack. I am okay with doing most of the work and have my programmer who can help with some of the technical. I just don't want to take stabs in the dark and waste resources on ineffective or worst, potentially damaging results. So anyone here know where I can find such a strategist? Link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LinkMoser0 -
How to Create automate Content for Big Ecommerce Site
Hello guys, Im planning to do some big changes on my ecommerce, On my ecommerce i normally ship services so tons of relative products but it will change from each brand. For example i would like to say the same thing on each product landing page but just changing the keyword for the proper product lading page , but my fear is that this will look like duplicate content. How can i deal with information on each landing page on a ecommerce that have more than 1k on services. I dont want to write this differently on each 1k on pages for products since they are doing the same thing but in different brands. I hope you can help me on this. Note: Is there any source of doing this type of Seo for automate page service generator?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aldovacano0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0