What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
-
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
-
Does a duplicate content penalty impact specific pages or entire sites? If I wanted to test using the cross-domain canonical on a certain section of my site, would the impact be visible? Or would I need to put cross-domain canonicals on everything appearing on both sites in order to see the results?
-
Changing the articles or even page titles is not an option.
That's too bad. What Irving suggested has the potential for HUGE wins.
I'd find a way if that was my site.
-
Sure, that is a solution, but then rankings for the additional dupe sites went away because you basically suggested to Google "this URL on this site should not rank, because it is a copy of this article on this site, so give that site credit not me"
I believe that Jon has not been hit yet and wants both sites to rank, but is unable to change the content on either site to be unique. Any additional code you can insert in between the articles to create less similarity between both pages should help lessen the chance of getting hit but not a guarantee.
-
Irving, I had a client who had been hit with a manual penalty for Doorway Pages. They weren't Doorway Pages, they were just pages on various domains (that he owned) with a lot of duplicate content on them. We got him reinstated when we implemented cross-domain canonicals and filed a re-inclusion request. Sounds similar to this case?
Just wondering if anyone had heard of sites being hit like that for dupe content?
-
LOL true.
With all due respect, 301, noindex or cross-canonicalizing is as much of a solution as saying delete your second site. My suggestion of breaking up the content or appending additional content will possibly help you avoid a dupe content filter being triggered.
Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter so the worst that happens is the main site that was bringing you the majority of traffic gets filtered and loses rankings to the secondary site.
I think a good question to ask at this point would be for you to clarify your first sentence: "I manage two sites that share some content" can you define what "some" means? are they main conversion pages or secondary blog posts, and what percentage of the site is dupe content?
BTW, hope you're not interlinking your two sites keep them as separate as possible.
-
Try this post for more info:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
Sounds like you don't need to manage the threat of duplicate content; you are producing the duplicate content yourself. You are instead wanting to minimize the effect duplicate content has from one site to the next. The only way I know of to get eliminate the risk of duplicate content penalties is to noindex, 301 redirect, or provide canonical URLs.
Since you want both sites to continue being indexed, you can either keep doing what you're doing (and hope you don't get hit) or use canonical URLs and pick which site is best for each page.
Hope this helps.
-
If I used the cross-domain canonical, would that mean that one site would stop appearing in search results?
-
You can append additional content to the bottom of the page on the more important site, or break up the article by adding content and or ads between the paragraphs (which will probably result in article fragmentation) but if you're not a news source it's not a big deal.
-
I'm no technical expert but it sounds like you're playing with fire. I've seen more than one site penalised for exactly this. If it looks like you're trying to rank the same piece of content twice, at least one of the URLs is at risk of filtering or a penalty. Isn't this exactly what the cross-domain canonical was created for?
-
Changing the articles or even page titles is not an option.
-
Paraphrase the articles on the highest traffic pages to your secondary site and/or tweak the keyword targets
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
-
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Any reasons why social media properties are ranking higher than the site's own name?
The site below has social media properties and other sites coming up before it's own listing even for the exact search of the site name. Any ideas why this is happening? Link Any input is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
How to best handle expired content?
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this? Here are a few examples. With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year? Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Rich Snippets not appearing in Search Results
Hi Everyone, Just a few questions on rich snippets please: We have now integrated microdata (data-vocabulary.org) on all our product pages like http://www.homeshop18.com/samsung-galaxy-tab-2-310-tablet/computer-peripherals/ipads-tablets/product:30409470/cid:8937/ which I have tested on the rich snippets testing tool which Google provides and all is working fine and is rendering properly in the tool but it is not coming in search results in google. Are we doing everything right or is there any issue in our implementation? How long does it take usually for rich snippets to appear in google organic search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h1seo0 -
Rank keeps decreasing - Is my site penalized
Hello, I have run into a bit of a predicament. All of my search terms keep dropping on a monthly basis, even though I am adding quality guest posts every month. Even if I get a handful of articles on semi-popular sites my ranking still drop. I am wondering, is my site penalized? My metrics also over exceed my rankings using both the Moz metrics and pagerank. I have a PR of 5 and domain rank of 50+ and I am still getting outranked on every term by people with lower metrics (PR 2 and DR of 30) In the past I have done mostly article syndication through sites like ezinearticles and isnare, but that was about 5 years ago. I have also done a couple of the "pay $50 for 100 directory submissions" once but that was also about 5 years ago. Has anyone experienced anything like this? Anyone have any advice? As you can probably tell I am getting really frustrated. P.S. - This is happening for all pages on my website, not just particular pages. Is is possible to get a site wide penalty, and if so, what can be done about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mjstout0 -
What is the best way to run a blog?
Hi, I was wondering what is the best way to run a blog? The options I thought of are: Completely separate domain with many links to my main site. blog.domain.com www.domain.com/blog Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Best solution to get mass URl's out the SE's index
Hi, I've got an issue where our web developers have made a mistake on our website by messing up some URL's . Because our site works dynamically IE the URL's generated on a page are relevant to the current URL it ment the problem URL linked out to more problem URL's - effectively replicating an entire website directory under problem URL's - this has caused tens of thousands of URL's in SE's indexes which shouldn't be there. So say for example the problem URL's are like www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/ It seems I can correct this by doing the following: 1/. Use Robots.txt to disallow access to /incorrect-directory/* 2/. 301 the urls like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/folder1/page1/ 3/. 301 URL's to the root correct directory like this:
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page2/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder2/ 301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/ Which method do you think is the best solution? - I doubt there is any link juice benifit from 301'ing URL's as there shouldn't be any external links pointing to the wrong URL's.0