How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
-
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author?
Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A.
Will that work, or is there a better solution?
This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
-
Thanks grasshopper!
-
No; site B is using Spry, a now defunct Adobe framework: http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2012/08/update-on-adobe-spry-framework-availability.html
Site A uses ExpressionEngine.
-
Hi Allie,
You're absolutely on the right track. Cross-domain canonicalization was created to deal with situations exactly like the one you're describing. I've used it many times, and it works great.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
Im pretty sure you can trackback to the original.. Are you using wordpress?
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
-
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
SEO effect of content duplication across hub of sites
Hello, I have a question about a website I have been asked to work on. It is for a real estate company which is part of a larger company. Along with several other (rival) companies it has a website of property listings which receives a feed of properties from a central hub site - so lots of potential for page, title and meta content duplication (if if isn't already occuring) across the whole network of sites. In early investigation I don't see any of these sites ranking very well at all in Google for expected search phrases. Before I start working on things that might improve their rankings, I wanted to ask some questions from you guys: 1. How would such duplication (if it is occuring) effect the SEO rankings of such sites individually, or the whole network/hub collectively? 2. Is it possible to tell if such a site has been "burnt" for SEO purposes, especially if or from any duplication? 3. If such a site or the network has been totally burnt, are there any approaches or remedies that can be made to improve the site's SEO rankings significantly, or is the only/best option to start again from scratch with a brand new site, ensuring the use of new meta descriptions and unique content? Thanks in advance, Graham
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gmwhite9991 -
Changing content in a well established page.
I have a question i rank well for O'fallon lawn care and I dont rank well for O'Fallon, MO lawn care. Is it ok to go in that page and add some content optimizing it around O'Fallon, MO Lawn care or is that a bad idea. Appreciate any feed back thanks everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gslc0 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0 -
Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?
Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse. We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site. I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron0