Finding Duplicate Content Spanning more than one Site?
-
Hi forum, SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site to another site to see if they share "duplicate content?" Thanks!
-
The Alert thing is great! I use it when we write new content (along with CopyScape after a week or so) just so I can make sure I'm outranking it. lol
-
Yes. I totally agree with Darin. There isn't a duplicate content penalty, per se, and the tools he listed are quite good suggestions as well.
-
IMHO, even if the HTML is different you could have duplicate content if the H1 or paragraph text is substantially similar. However, is this automatically penalized? No. Syndication of content can be quite prevalent on the Web. For example the AP breaks a news story and posts it online and it is subsequently picked up by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Wherever the content appeared first, particularly if it has a canonical tag in place, that source will be credited with having the original content. The other sites aren't going to be penalized, but they aren't going to benefit from it either.
Similar things happen on large e-commerce sites all the time. For example, 100's of e-commerce stores sell lightbulbs. Those descriptions are most certainly "substantially similar." It'd be kind of strange if they weren't. They aren't penalized for that.
I hope this is helpful! It is always good to set up a Google Alert for any great pieces of content you do write, just so you can be aware of who might be copying your stuff! (Tynt.com can also be very useful for this).
Good luck!
Dana
-
Just for the record there isn't any "Duplicate Content Penalty" so don't worry to much about this. Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.
However, to answer your question I use copyscape to do this but you have to insert a URL and not just lines at a time.
Here are some other ones I've heard good things about:
I agree with Dana on the Google thing too. Like she said, "Just be sure to put quotes around your snippet."
-
This helps, thanks Dana. Is the actual paragraph content the main source of a duplicate content penalty? For example, what if the pages share different metadata and the HTML is entirely different except for the H1 text and paragraph content?
-
Hi Zora,
This best way to do this is to grab a random section of text from the page and go to Google, then paste that section of text in the search bar inside "quotes." For example, from your question above, I could search:
"SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site"
you will see that the result in Google is a result to this page (once it's been indexed, which hasn't happened quite yet) - Just be sure to put quotes around your snippet.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How would you suggest finding content topics for this site?
Hello, How would you suggest finding content topics for this site: nlpca.com The end goal is signups for training seminars in San Francisco, California and Salt Lake City, Utah. In the future the seminars will move more towards life coaching trainings but right now they are mostly about NLP. NLP is a personal development field. Just looking for ideas for the process of finding topics for the most link-bait-heavy fabulous content. The owners of the site are authorities in the field. This is for both blog and article content. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Subdomains - duplicate content - robots.txt
Our corporate site provides MLS data to users, with the end goal of generating leads. Each registered lead is assigned to an agent, essentially in a round robin fashion. However we also give each agent a domain of their choosing that points to our corporate website. The domain can be whatever they want, but upon loading it is immediately directed to a subdomain. For example, www.agentsmith.com would be redirected to agentsmith.corporatedomain.com. Finally, any leads generated from agentsmith.easystreetrealty-indy.com are always assigned to Agent Smith instead of the agent pool (by parsing the current host name). In order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, any page that is viewed on one of the agent subdomains always has a canonical link pointing to the corporate host name (www.corporatedomain.com). The only content difference between our corporate site and an agent subdomain is the phone number and contact email address where applicable. Two questions: Can/should we use robots.txt or robot meta tags to tell crawlers to ignore these subdomains, but obviously not the corporate domain? If question 1 is yes, would it be better for SEO to do that, or leave it how it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0