Checking for content duplication against content on your own site.
-
We are currently trying to rewrite our product descriptions and I'm afraid some of the salespeople that are writing the descriptions are plagiarizing one-another's writing. Is there a content duplication checker that will allow you to check a piece of writing against a specific site rather than all of the web?
-
I assume that you have an admin section in the CMS where you are editing and entering these articles before they go live.
You need to get a developer to simply write a search algo that when you create a new article and before it goes live, it takes sections of your content and looks for matches/duplicates. You can set a requirement that it has to match on a minimum of a 4 to 5 word string and other such limitations to make sure you are not matching too many items. It will take a few tests to find a sweet spot of too many matches vs not enough.
With 17K pages, this is the only way you can really do this in an efficient way, you need some IT support/development. They may have to create a reporting layer as well to help you sift through the results.
Good luck.
-
I have two dev servers, one of which it is possible to do what you're talking about but that is the absolute least efficient tool to use for this.
The crawl diagnostics are updated about once a week which means I would have to post the new content and hope I got it online in time for the crawl. If I didn't then I would have to wait an additional week to see results.
The crawl diagnostics also limits the amount of pages it will crawl on your site to 10,000. I stated before that I have over 17,000 pages. So even if I did use this method, the chances of that page being crawled is little better than 50/50.
Also, the crawl diagnostics only tell you what pages have duplicate content - not the exact content that was duplicated. That means I'd have to manually find the page I'm targeting, then follow the supposed duplicate content suggestions proposed by the crawler and find the similarities myself.
I think it's very safe to say that the crawl diagnostics, nor any product that SEOmoz provides, is an answer to my issue. If I thought it was, I would have already been using it and would not have posted this question.
-
Hi Michael,
Having a website that big means that you might have a test or dev environment.
If not create one.
if you have something like test.yourwebsite.com and submit it to the SEOmoz tools as a new project you can see a report before your website goes live.
Cornel
-
Those are good answers and would work on a smaller scale site. We currently have over 17,000 product pages so I can't really use either method. It's looking like a google custom search is the best bet even though I can't search an entire paragraph at a time.
-
Just off the top of my head, there are a few low tech ways to do it....
If you have Win 7 the searching has improved greatly - just move all files to a local machine - and search the directory you placed in for the content you are wanting to check - it will give all files that contain the words. (but can become overloading)
If you have dreamweaver or other enterprise level editor - almost all have a site search function to where you can search/profile code/text and have it find one by one which pages contain the searched terms - or globally list them.
Other than that, probably a custom script -or a google search for an HTML profiler might help?
Shane
-
That's for pages that are already published and crawled. I want to able to search my site for entire sentences and/or paragraphs of text that I have yet to publish so I can make sure it's not being used elsewhere on the site. The crawl diagnostics tell me I have duplicate content after the fact - I'm trying to take a proactive approach rather than reactive.
-
The duplicate content from you website is shown in the SEOmoz tools.
Check the Crawl Diagnostics Summary:
Cornel
-
That site searches the entire web for copies. I'm looking for something to crawl my own site for 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
-
Duplicate content? - Ecommerce reviews loading the same products on every page
Hello there! I use a plugin on my ecom site that shows customer reviews - not product reviews but general shopping experience reviews. The plugin also loads links and short descriptions of products those customers bought. Having installed it site-wide, on every page there are short descriptions of the same products. Of course, as people leave new reviews the content changes (but it doesn't happen very often). So the question is: Is having links and short descriptions of the same products on every page harmful for SEO in this case? I'd be grateful for any insight into this matter.
On-Page Optimization | | thpchlk0 -
How do I keep content-refreshment manageble for large site with facetted product categories?
Dear MOZ'ers,
On-Page Optimization | | Marketing-Omoda
i hope you can help me with the following issue: As a fashion e-commerce site we have a category structure by gender: , brand, product-category and colour. We sell over 250 brands in 50 categories. Off course, we don't sell products in every category for all brands but, in general, we sell 3 or 4 product categories for a brand. Next to this, we also have unique content for brand-product-gender (in fact this is the most common in our site-structure, since fashion is really a gender-based product.) We are planning to leave the site category as it is. we rank well for specific products like 'blue mens sneakers' My question is about copy, or more specific: to keep content-refreshment manageble. At the moment we have a small text at the top of the page and long form content on the bottom (very low below the fold, near the footer, only shown when the product-lister is) Because of seasonality in fashion, category text are regularly updated. As you can imagine, this is quit some work and pretty expensive. So now my question is: on which page level should you advice to have long form content, or distinctive content at all?
On the one hand I'm really sceptical about the value of the text at the bottom, on the other hand I am afraid that, should I decide to remove content from lower hierarchy pages, I might give the wrong signal to search engines: making my site from content rich content modest.0 -
Do we need to worry about internal duplicate content?
Hi, I have a question about internal duplicate content. We have a catalogue of around 4000 products. Most of these do have individual descriptions but for most of the products they contain a generic summary that includes a sentence to begin with that includes each product name. We're currently working on descriptions for each product, but as you can imagine it's quite a chore. I was wondering if there are actually any penalties for this or whether we can ignore the crawl errors from the moz report? Thanks in Advance!
On-Page Optimization | | 10dales0 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
Redirecting pages (old site to new site)
I have a question- there is one location, one set of pages for both the old and new site on the same host environment so when I did the redirect it get into a loop trying to redirect from itself to itself Not sure how its gonna affect SEO. Will pages get hit for duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Yanez0 -
Duplicated Content Column in excel
I'd like to see all duplicated content URLs in excel. But when I do the export to csv, and then use text to columns, I end up with an empty duplicated content column. The URLs should be in column AF in excel, but this column is empty. Can somebody help me on this?
On-Page Optimization | | jdclerck0 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Duplicate Content and Duplicate Page Title Errors
I am getting a lot of duplicate content and duplicate page title errors from my crawl analysis. I using volusion and it looks like the photo gallery is causing the duplicate content errors. both are sitting at 231, this shows I have done something wrong... Example URL: Duplicate Page Content http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Duplicate Page Title http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Would anyone know how to properly disallow this? Would this be as simple as a robots.txt entry or something a little more involved within volusion? Any help is appreicated. Cheers Geoff B. (a.k.a) newbie.
On-Page Optimization | | GeoffBatterham0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0