Duplicate Content?
-
My client is a manufacturers representative for highly technical controls. The manufacturers do not sell their products directly, relying on manufacturers reps to sell and service them. Most but not all of them publish their specs on their sites, usually in PDF only.
As a service to our customers and with permission of the manufacturers we publish the manufacturers specs on our site for our customers in HTML with images and downloadable PDF's — this constitutes our catalogue. The pages are lengthy and technical, and are pretty much the opposite of thin content.
The URLS for these (technical) queries rank well, so Google doesn't seem to mind. Does this constitute duplicate content and can we be penalized for it?
-
I like Frederico's response and agree with it. If you are providing additional content and value (which is good for the site visitor), you are fine. We actually do a very similar thing with highly technical data and the only time we ran into duplicate content issues was when we accidentally had three pages about the same product because it applied to three different categories. To fix the issue, we created a new product page listing all three categories on the page itself, and applied canonical tags from the other three duplicate pages to the new page.
-
That's pretty much what I thought. After being steady for a couple of years, traffic from organic search has started to fluctuate within the last month or so from day to day and I wondered if we were being penalized.
-
No, Google is smart enough to determine which content shouldn't be duplicated and what content is most likely to be the same in all sites (exactly your situation).
As a side note, if you are adding the content in HTML, plus providing an extra value, you will probably rank higher than those that just display the product specs as a downloadable PDF.
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
-
Dublicate Content: Almost samt site on different domains
Hi, I own a couple of casting websites, which I'm at the moment launching "local" copies of all over the world. When I launch my website in a new country, the content is basically allways the same, except the language sometimes changes country for country. The domains will vary, so the sitename would be site.es for Spain, site.sg for Singapore, site.dk for Denmark and so. The websites will also feature diffent jobs (castings) and diffent profiles on the search.pages and so, BUT the more static pages are the same content (About us, The concept, Faq, Create user and so). So my Questions are: Is this something that is bad for Google SEO? The sites are atm NOT linking to each other with language-flags or anything - Should I do this? Basically to tell google that
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
the business behind all these sites are somewhat big. Is there a way to inform Google on, that these sites should NOT be treated as dublicate content (Canonical tag wont do, since I want the "same" content to be listet on the locally Google sites). Hope there is some experts here which can help. /Kasper0 -
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
How much content is it safe to change?
I have read that it is unsafe to change more than 20% of your site’s content in any update. The rationale is that "Changing too much at once can flag your site within the Google algorithm as having something suspicious going on." Is this true, has anyone had any direct experiences of this or similar?
Algorithm Updates | | GrouchyKids0 -
Google indexing site content that I did not wish to be indexed
Hi is it pretty standard for Google to index content that you have not specifically asked them to index i.e. provided them notification of a page's existence. I have just been alerted by 'Mention' about some new content that they have discovered, the page is on our site yes and may be I should have set it to NO INDEX but the page only went up a couple of days ago and I was making it live so that someone could look at it and see how the page was going to look in its final iteration. Normally we go through the usual process of notifying Google via GWMT, adding it to our site map.xml file, publishing it via our G+ stream and so on. Reviewing our Analytics it looks like there has been no traffic to this page yet and I know for a fact there are no links to this page. I am surprised at the speed of the indexation, is it a example of brand mention? Where an actual link is now no longer required? Cheers David
Algorithm Updates | | David-E-Carey0 -
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 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
Update content
y'all, what is the recommended amount of time in which content on a website should be refreshed? TY
Algorithm Updates | | imageworks-2612900