What's the best practice for handling duplicate content of product descriptions with a drop-shipper?
-
We write our own product descriptions for merchandise we sell on our website. However, we also work with drop-shippers, and some of them simply take our content and post it on their site (same photos, exact ad copy, etc...). I'm concerned that we'll loose the value of our content because Google will consider it duplicated.
We don't want the value of our content undermined... What's the best practice for avoiding any problems with Google?
Thanks,
Adam
-
I totally agree but you should be able to have another set written with great quality - The big drop shippers always rewrite manufacturer descriptions because of this issue.
- You need to decide if the gains out-ways the costs
- You need to decide if the gains out-ways the costs
-
oops, hit submit button twice..
-
Having two sets of ad copy does effectively solve the Google issue, but it creates two non-Google issues, both of which are potentially costly. For example:
-
I have to write new copy for them which costs time and money, and even then they may still not use it, which creates enforcement issues.
-
If it's substantially different copy (and possibly inferior, because let's face it, it's hard to write two sets of good compelling copy on the same item), then it may not convert as well, which means they sell less... and we sell less
I'm not saying you can't solve my original problem with this method. I'm just saying that there are some very real costs to take into consideration
-
-
Go with David's method, or a hybrid. Present them useable text and ask that they put that on their sites and if they won't then ask they they use canonical or noindex directives.
-
You could have them add a rel- canonical - But dropshippers want your content so they can rank they will not want to use it.
-
Hey guys, thanks for all the fast responses!
I thought I remembered reading something about a technical method for demonstrating to Google that your version of content is the original version. Is there a way to do that?
And yeah, we could ask them to change their behavior (or require it), but there are costs to both and I'm wondering if there's a more effective solution (such as the possibly mythical one above).
-
penalization isnt the only thing you need to worry about its a dropshipper that is stronger then you out ranking you.
-
The best way is to give your drop shippers a feed with 1 set of descriptions and your site having another set (people will still copy but much less)
-
Are these dropshippers people who have to obey by your agreements in order to continue doing business with you? Would it hurt your business to create a requirement that they either create unique content or have their pages use the noindex code to prevent google from finding the dupe?
Do most of your dropshippers get their traffic via Organic Search? Or are they using other advertising sources?
-
There is really nothing you can do because someone else is copying your description.
The only thing I can initially come up with is asking your dropshippers to not copy descriptions.
However, the content that is duplicated and might not really negatively effect your SEO. Google understands e-commerce and a lot of the times products on e-commerce sites are very similar and they do not get penalized. Another thing is that you originally created the description and Google does index according to freshness. As long as you are indexed first with the description, I don't see how Google can penalize you.
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 Page Content - default.html
I am showing a duplicate content error in moz. I have site.com and site.com/default.html How can I fix that? Should I use a canonical tag? If so, how would i do that?
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
Moz Crawl Shows Duplicate Content Which Doesn't Seem To Appear In Google?
Morning All, First post, be gentle! So I had Moz crawl our website with 2500 high priority issues of duplicate content, not good. However if I just do a simple site:www.myurl.com in Google, I cannot see these duplicate pages....very odd. Here is an example....
On-Page Optimization | | scottiedog
http://goo.gl/GXTE0I
http://goo.gl/dcAqdU So the same page has a different URL, Moz brings this up as an issue, I would agree with that. However if I google both URL's in Google, they will both bring up the same page but with the original URL of http://goo.gl/zDzI7j ...in other words, two different URL's bring up the same indexed page in Google....weird I thought about using a wildcard in the robots.txt to disallow these duplicate pages with poor URL's....something like.... Disallow: /*display.php?product_id However, I read various posts that it might not help our issues? Don't want to make things worse. On another note, my colleague paid for a "SEO service" and they just dumped 1000's of back-links to our website, of course that's come back to bite us in the behind. Anyone have any recommendations for a good service to remove these back-links? Thanks in advance!!0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
For duplicate page content, how different should pages be? For example, I have seven locations and on each location page, we offer a discount. The discounts are the same currently and open into a pop-up window. So it looks something like this: mysite.com/locationA/dicount mysite.com/locationB/discount mysite.com/locationX/discount The pages are identical. Should I change the verbiage on each page or let it be? I noticed that our organic search rankings have dropped since our site upgrade and this is one item that SEOMOZ has noted. Thanks! DHO
On-Page Optimization | | DougHoltOnline0 -
Bogus duplicate meta descriptions in GWT
UPDATE:
On-Page Optimization | | PatioLifeStyle
The same type of error (returning a page structure with no content and no CSS) can be replicated by adding a trailing slash to any valid URL. This leads me to believe that there is a problem on the server. It should be serving the custom 404 page instead of junk. I have fixed the "ezine" directory problem by doing a wildcard 301 on that directory, so you can ignore that issue. We are experiencing issues on one of our sites that we cannot resolve. It is an issue that many sites seem to have, according to discussions within the Google Webmaster Tools forum. We have tried several of the suggestions made in that forum, without success. We need somebody to help us resolve this: who has experience with this issue who knows exactly what is causing it who knows how to fix it Definition of Problem Location:
Google Webmaster Tools | Optimization | HTML Improvements | Duplicate meta descriptions (similar issues also appear in the same area under Duplicate title tags) By drilling down into a listed error, we see two versions of the problem: Multiple instances of the page are displayed, and appended to the URL is another URL of a page that has no relationship to the first. The screenshot also shows a directory (/ezine) that was deleted and renamed. See attached pic
duplicatemetadescriptions1.jpg Also by drilling down in the same way, some of the instances show unique URLs, but the ones listed (other than the correct one), do not exist. See attached pic
duplicatemetadescriptions2.jpg Please offer only KNOWN solution(s). Thank you. 79cNe0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content (index.htm)
I get an error of "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Content" for the following pages in the SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics. But these pages are the same one! Duhhhh.... Is there a way to hide this false error? http://www.stdtime.com/ http://www.stdtime.com/index.htm BTW, I also get "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Title" for this page. Another false error...
On-Page Optimization | | raywhite0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0 -
Meta description tags & title tags duplicate content?
Although meta description tags have no impact on rankings - can there be a negative effect from having many duplicate meta title + description tags with just 1-2 words switched out?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw0 -
Duplicate page content errors
Site just crawled and report shows many duplicate pages but doesn't tell me which ones are dups of each other. For you experienced duplicate page experts, do you have a subscription with copyscape and pay $.05 per test? What is the best way to clear these? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990