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 -
Has anyone used http://www.congoo.com
Hi, i got sent an email and normally i ignore them but decided on this occasion i would try it. It was an email from congoo.com saying it is a great place to get noticed. Now i have joined and to be honest it is a lot of rubbish when it comes to promoting yourself. I have mine here http://www.congoo.com/In2town The only place that i see you can promote yourself is at the top but once you change your article it goes, so is it all a con. would like to hear your thoughts
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Can I share share my content with other sites either as a individual post or RSS or will I be encourage duplicate content on the web and upset Google
Hi, I have a new site http://www.homeforbusiness.co.uk. I want to encourage traffic to the site by sharing some of my content with other related websites which have a higher PR ranking and traffic for a link to my site. Is this going to upset Google re-duplicate content and devalue my site and stop any organic rankings in the future? Equally some high PR sites which have a good synergy with mine such as http://thewomensbusinessclubs.com/ allow me to add my RSS feed with their blog network. Is this a good thing to do or not for the same reasons as above? Or can I only do the above my creating fresh content? Thanks, Elizabeth Conley
Content Development | | econley0 -
Content Marketing, Who do I use?
I know nothing about content marketing, so who do I hire? Who are the authorities & leaders in this new era of digital marketing.
Content Development | | KristopherWho0 -
Using syndicated content / videos
Hi all, We are looking at using some syndicated video content on our main category pages. We are an pharmacy and offer prescription medicines (Yes we are NHS registered and no we don't sell generic products). I want to use the videos to increase the UX for the category pages and increase stickiness......however i am a little worried about how Google will see this. We don't have the time or budget to create our own videos but the rest of the content around them is all ours. The videos are provided by the NHS so they are good quality content and should add value to the consumer. Will big G stiff us for doing this?
Content Development | | nicc19760 -
Duplicate Text on Blog & Internal News Page
I have two places I post news for our company. Our blog - typically more informal posts
Content Development | | seo-hunter
mycompany.wordpress.com & Our news page - typically more newsworthy than the blog
mycompany.com/news My question is, It is okay to just copy the exact text from my wordpress blog and paste to my news area of my site and vice versa? Does this hurt ranking potential for either page?0 -
Posting youtube videos on your site-use irframe or "old embed code"
If you choose "embed" now, youtube gives you the choice of using an iframe: <iframe width="430" height="352" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0-nKXALtHWs?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> or, the old embed code: <object width="430" height="352"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0-nKXALtHWs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0-nKXALtHWs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="352" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></object> Is either better when it comes to seo?
Content Development | | MarieHaynes0 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0