Duplicate Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, is it a problem?
-
Hi,
If i use same terms of use and privacy policy content across my websites, does it amounts to duplicate content issues? Does it affect my websites in any manner?
Regards
-
Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors. If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal.
This is true for most SEO factors. If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.
-
You can do almost anything you wish on a "noindex" tagged page. You are telling the search engine bot to exclude the page from the search index, so the page should not affect your ranking.
The reason your site's # of pages is a factor, is your overall site is viewed as a whole. If you have a basic site with 10 pages, and there is a problem with 1 of the pages having duplicate content, then 10% of your site is affected, and this can impact how the search engine views your site. If your site hosted a forums with 10k pages, then that 1 page would represent 0.001 of your site, so the impact would not have any real effect.
-
Thanks for the helpful reply Alan! Can you please explain this - "If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact". How duplicate content issues vary between small and big sites? I was under the impression that number of pages do not have any influence in duplicate content.
Is it okay to use the same privacy policy and terms of use across different websites as long as i noindex,follow them?
-
How big is your site? If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact. But in reality, I expect your site is not primarily made up of keyword phrases that either of those pages would be optimized for, and that you have more than a few pages. If so, any "negative" aspect would not be severe.
Having said that, it really is best to just use a robots meta tag set to noindex,follow (my preference instead of blocking completely in the robots.txt file.
-
Thanks for the reply Ryan! But if i don't block it via robots.txt file or noindex tag, will it affect my site negatively? I mean the overall site
-
I would recommend blocking pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, legal, etc. It is unlikely these pages would ever bring traffic to your site. Even if they did, it is not going to be the quality traffic you desire.
In robots.txt you can add
Disallow: /pages/privacy/
substitute your local path for /pages/privacy/
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 Descriptions
Hi, Our Woo Commerce store has about 30 product tags, of which a separate page is created for each, therefore needing the usual titles and descriptions adding. I want to know if the pages will be penalised if I 90% duplicate the 150 word description for product tags that have areas of overlap. How important is this? Thanks.
Content Development | | Arnikabhupal0 -
Different WP Taxonomies seen as duplicate content
Hey guys, We're seeing Moz report "duplicate" content on pages like: mysite.com/interesting-category/ and mysite.com/interesting-tag. Why exactly is this, and is there something that we should do about this? Obviously some of the same posts will intersect on pages like category, tag, author pages. Thanks
Content Development | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Duplicate content on the same site
We have a client who wants us to use the same piece of copy twice on their website. Once to promote a workshop and once to promote a conference talk. We feel this would be bad practice from a user perspective, but we were wondering how search engines would regard this? Thanks Ian
Content Development | | Substance-create0 -
Translated text: should I use canonical link?
Hello everybody, I'm writing an article in Danish, which I have translated into English on a Danish blog. But I'm not sure if I have to use the canonical link from the English version to the Danish, or whether I should just publish both without using canonical link. What is your recommendation for this? Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks & regards, Jonathan
Content Development | | JoLinda910 -
Author Rank - Using the brand as the author
Hi i'm building a new site and want to start building up author rank right from the start. If you are building author rank for a brand, do you think its fine to use the brand as the actual author of the content, instead of a actual person? Or using a stage name rather then a persons actual name, and have your writers write under that particular stage name? Would love to hear peoples opinions. Cheers, Mark
Content Development | | monster990 -
Merge pages - use redirects?
I have merged the content of three HTML pages to one. pages one URL stays as is. the URLs of the pages 2 and 3 are obsolete. Would you recommend to use 301 redirects from the obsolete URLs to page 1? Other proposals? Thanks, Thorsten
Content Development | | ThorstenDeska0 -
Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site
I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?
Content Development | | andywozhere0 -
Duplicate Content on WordPress Blogs?
We are getting ready to add a WordPress blog to our established website. Our plans are to place it in a subfolder on our website to maximize rank. My question is...Do we need to utilize a Meta Robots WordPress plugin by Yoast or similar so that noindex,follow robots meta tags will prevent search engine indexing of search result pages, subpages and category archives? We want to avoid the dreaded Duplicate Content Error and penalty. Any other great SEO WordPress plugins? Thank you for your time. Brian
Content Development | | gw3seo0