Are all duplicate contents bad?
-
We were badly hit by Panda back in January 2012. Unfortunately, it is only now that we are trying to recover back.
CASE 1:
We develop software products. We send out 500-1000 word description about the product to various download sites so that they can add to their product listing. So there are several hundred download sites with same content.How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason?
CASE 2:
In the above case the product description does not match with any content on our website. However, there are several software download sites that copy and paste the content from our website as the product description. So in this case, the duplicate content match with our website.
How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason?
Along with all the download sites, there are also software piracy & crack sites that have the duplicate content.
So, should I remove duplicate content only from the software piracy & crack sites or also from genuine download sites?
Does Google reject all kind of duplicate content? Or it depends on who hosts the duplicate content?
Confused
Please help. -
It is tricky. As Michael said it is important to get your content indexed first, which can help identify you as the source. Google doesn't always do a great job of that. Generally, I don't worry too much about Case 1, but in your case, it can be tougher. The problem is that many download sites can have very high authority and could start outranking you for these product descriptions. If that happens, it's unlikely you'd be penalized, but you could be filtered out or knocked down the rankings, which might feel like a penalty.
Here's the thing, with Case 1, though. If these download sites are simply outranking you, but you're distributing product, is it so awful? I think you have to look at the trade-off through the lens of your broader business goals.
Case 2 is tougher, since there's not a lot you can do about it, short of DMCA takedowns. You've got to hope Google sorts it out. Again, getting in front of it and getting your content in the index quickly is critical.
If you were hit by Panda, I'd take a hard look at anything on your own site that could be harming you. Are you spinning out variations of your own content? Are you creating potentially duplicate URLs? Are you indexing a ton of paginated content (internal searches, for example). You may find that the external duplicates are only part of your Panda problem - if you can clean up what you control, you'll be much better off. I have an extensive duplicate content write-up here:
-
For all new content it is important to get indexed fast. There is the scenario that if your site is crawled infrequently another site may get that copy indexed first and by default is viewed as theirs. So with any new content I would post on social media as quickly as possible - G+, Twitter etc to get noticed and to mark as yours. G+ author attribute will help.
-
Hi Gautam,
Good questions, it really hard to say what Google determines as duplicate content so this will just be my hunch on your issue. As I have experienced Google won't 'penalize' you as you're the owner of the content and you can't be the victim of other people stealing or copying your content. Also if you have provided these sites with your content. Mostly because you're often not in charge of the content management on somebodies elses site.
Hope this helps a bit!
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
-
Seeing some really bad sites that ranked in my niche years ago reaching 1st page
It started after the update about 4 websites form the 1st page dropped to the 2nd and 4 of the other sites just popped back to the 1st page and the bad part is that the Da and inbound links of these sites are really bad, so my question is must we just wait this out till Google realises how bad these site are and some of them haven't been updated in years links broken i can go on and on. what these sites have is just the age of the domains, but can this really be the main focus of these results?
Algorithm Updates | | johan80 -
How often should I update the content on my pages?
I have started dropping on my rankings - due to lack of time after having a baby. I'm still managing to blog but I'm wondering if I update the content on my pages will that help? All my Meta tags and page descriptions were updated over a year ago - do I need to update these too? We were ranking in the top spots for a good few years, but we're slowly falling 😞 Please give me any advice to keep us from falling even further. I have claimed all my listings, and try to add new links once a month. I share my blog to all social sites and work hard to get Google reviews, we have 53 which is higher than any of our competitors. Any other ideas? Have I missed something that Google is looking for nowadays? Many thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | Lauren16890 -
SEO Myth-Busters -- Isn't there a "duplicate content" penalty by another name here?
Where is that guy with the mustache in the funny hat and the geek when you truly need them? So SEL (SearchEngineLand) said recently that there's no such thing as "duplicate content" penalties. http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657 by the way, I'd love to get Rand or Eric or others Mozzers aka TAGFEE'ers to weigh in here on this if possible. The reason for this question is to double check a possible 'duplicate content" type penalty (possibly by another name?) that might accrue in the following situation. 1 - Assume a domain has a 30 Domain Authority (per OSE) 2 - The site on the current domain has about 100 pages - all hand coded. Things do very well in SEO because we designed it to do so.... The site is about 6 years in the current incarnation, with a very simple e-commerce cart (again basically hand coded). I will not name the site for obvious reasons. 3 - Business is good. We're upgrading to a new CMS. (hooray!) In doing so we are implementing categories and faceted search (with plans to try to keep the site to under 100 new "pages" using a combination of rel canonical and noindex. I will also not name the CMS for obvious reasons. In simple terms, as the site is built out and launched in the next 60 - 90 days, and assume we have 500 products and 100 categories, that yields at least 50,000 pages - and with other aspects of the faceted search, it could create easily 10X that many pages. 4 - in ScreamingFrog tests of the DEV site, it is quite evident that there are many tens of thousands of unique urls that are basically the textbook illustration of a duplicate content nightmare. ScreamingFrog has also been known to crash while spidering, and we've discovered thousands of URLS of live sites using the same CMS. There is no question that spiders are somehow triggering some sort of infinite page generation - and we can see that both on our DEV site as well as out in the wild (in Google's Supplemental Index). 5 - Since there is no "duplicate content penalty" and there never was - are there other risks here that are caused by infinite page generation?? Like burning up a theoretical "crawl budget" or having the bots miss pages or other negative consequences? 6 - Is it also possible that bumping a site that ranks well for 100 pages up to 10,000 pages or more might very well have a linkuice penalty as a result of all this (honest but inadvertent) duplicate content? In otherwords, is inbound linkjuice and ranking power essentially divided by the number of pages on a site? Sure, it may be some what mediated by internal page linkjuice, but what's are the actual big-dog issues here? So has SEL's "duplicate content myth" truly been myth-busted in this particular situation? ??? Thanks a million! 200.gif#12
Algorithm Updates | | seo_plus0 -
Content Caching Memory & Removal of 301 Redirect for Relieving Links Penalty
Hi, A client site has had very poor link legacy, stretching for over 5 years. I started the campaign a year ago, providing valuable good quality links. Link removals and creating a disavow to Google have been done, however after months and months of waiting nothing has happened. If anything, after the recent penguin update, results have been further affected. A 301 redirect was undertaken last year, consequently associating those bad links with the new site structure. I have since removed the 301 redirect in an attempt to detach this legacy, however with little success. I have read up on this and not many people appear to agree whether this will work. Therefore, my new decision is to start a fresh using a new domain, switching from the .com to .co.uk version, helping remove all legacy and all association with the spam ridden .com. However, my main concern with this is whether Google will forever cach content from the spammy .com and remember it, because the content on the new .co.uk site will be exactly the same (content of great quality, receiving hundreds of visitors each month from the blog section along) The problem is definitely link related and NOT content as I imagine people may first query. This could then cause duplicate content, knowing that this content pre-existed on another domain - I will implement a robots.txt file removing all of the .com site , as well as a no index no follow - and I understand you can present a site removal to Google within webmaster tools to help fast track the deindexation of the spammy .com - then once it has been deindexed, the new .co.uk site will go live with the exact same content. So my question is whether Google will then completely forget that this content has ever existed, allowing me to use exactly the same content on the new .co.uk domain without the threat of a duplicate content issue? Also, any insights or experience in the removal of a 301 redirect, detaching legacy and its success would also be very helpful! Thank you, Denver
Algorithm Updates | | ProdoDigital0 -
Content, for the sake of the search engines
So we all know the importance of quality content for SEO; providing content for the user as opposed to the search engines. It used to be that copyrighting for SEO was treading the line between readability and keyword density, which is obviously no longer the case. So, my question is this, for a website which doesn't require a great deal of content to be successful and to fullfil the needs of the user, should we still be creating relavent content for the sake of SEO? For example, should I be creating content which is crawlable but may not actually be needed / accessed by the user, to help improve rankings? Food for thought 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | underscorelive0 -
Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to borrow product descriptions?
Hello, I work for an online retailer that has the opportunity to add a lot of SKUs to our site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site (with their permission). There are a lot of positives for us to do this, but one big question we have is what the borrowed content will do to our search rankings (we normally write our own original content in house for a couple thousand SKUs). Organic search traffic brings in a significant chunk of our business and we definitely don't want to do something that would jeopardize our rankings. Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to use the borrowed product descriptions? Is there a rule of thumb for what proportion of the site should be original content vs. duplicate content without running into issues with our search rankings? Thank you for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
Duplicate videos
We have multiple screen cast videos being made that are the same all except for city names being switched out. Does anyone know if this might be frowned upon by Google in the same way that duplicate content is?
Algorithm Updates | | Stevej240 -
Duplicate Content
Hi guys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOvNtPGGeHc http://themovies2012.info/wanderlust Will google know what site copy the content and what site own the content? The description on youtube is exactly the same as my review on themovies2012.info, but in the description on youtube i put link to my website... Will google know the difference?
Algorithm Updates | | prunarevic0