Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
-
Hi
We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains.
What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
-
Hi Tom
That's a great help, thank you for responding.
-
Hi there
If you're intending to rank both pages, then you will need to create unique content for both of them. Replicating or syndicating the content would severely hamper your ability to rank either of the pages.
If you want to include the content for the user but do not necessarily want to rank the page, you have a couple of options. You could a rel canonical tag to the new page that points to the old domain - this effectively tells Google to treat the old URL as the original and not to rank the duplicate content.
Alternatively, you could "noindex" one of the pages by adding this tag to the head section of your HTML: _-_again, this tells Google not to index this version of the page with the duplicate content.
You can learn more about canonicals and noindexing with these two handy SEOMoz guides:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
Hope this helps.
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
-
I am temporarily moving a site to a new domain. Which redirect is best?
A client is having their site redeveloped on a new platform in sections and are moving the sections that are on the new platform to a temporary subdomain until the entire site is migrated. This is happening over the course of 2-3 months. During this time, is it best for the site to use 302 temporary redirects during this time (URL path not changing), or is it best to 301 to the temp. domain, then 301 back to the original once the new platform is completely migrated? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt3120 -
Duplicate content based on filters
Hi Community, There have probably been a few answers to this and I have more or less made up my mind about it but would like to pose the question or as that you post a link to the correct article for this please. I have a travel site with multiple accommodations (for example), obviously there are many filter to try find exactly what you want, youcan sort by region, city, rating, price, type of accommodation (hotel, guest house, etc.). This all leads to one invevitable conclusion, many of the results would be the same. My question is how would you handle this? Via a rel canonical to the main categories (such as region or town) thus making it the successor, or no follow all the sub-category pages, thereby not allowing any search to reach deeper in. Thanks for the time and effort.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Duplicate Content Question
Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content. If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Worldwide Stores - Duplicate Content Question
Hello, We recently added new store views for our primary domain for different countries. Our primary url: www.store.com Different Countries URLS: www.store.com/au www.store.com/uk www.store.com/nz www.store.com/es And so forth and so on. This resulted in an almost immediate rankings drop for several keywords which we feel is a result of duplicate content creation. We've thousands of pages on our primary site. We've assigned a "no follow" tags to all store views for now, and trying to roll back the changes we did. However, we've seen some stores launching in different countries with same content, but with a country specific extensions like .co.uk, .co.nz., .com.au. At this point, it appears we have three choices: 1. Remove/Change duplicate content in country specific urls/store views. 2. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au with duplicate content for now. 3. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au etc with fresh content for all stores. Please keep in mind, option 1, and 3 can get very expensive keeping hundreds of products in untested territories. Ideally, we would like test first and then scale. However, we'd like to avoid any duplicate penalties on our main domain. Thanks for your help and answers on the same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globaleyeglasses0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1 -
How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content
Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server. Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more. I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ... All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ? here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion?? Again thanks a lot for your help 😃
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0 -
How risky is temporarily moving high value SEO pages to a brand new domain?
Hi, I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same. I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts: 1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly 5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rfjc0