Duplicate Content from Multiple Sources Cross-Domain
-
Hi Moz Community,
We have a client who is legitimately repurposing, or scraping, content from site A to site B. I looked into it and Google recommends the cross-domain rel=canonical tag below:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
The issue is it is not a one to one situation. In fact site B will have several pages of content from site A all on one URL. Below is an example of what they are trying to accomplish.
EX - www.siteB.com/apples-and-oranges is made up of content from www.siteA.com/apples & www.siteB.com/oranges
So with that said, are we still in fear of getting hit for duplicate content? Should we add multiple rel=canonical tags to reflect both pages? What should be our course of action.
-
Hi Kurt,
Multiple canonicals won't work. I believe our own Dr. Pete did some testing on this a couple years ago, and the results didn't pan out.
It there isn't original content on the page, you have a couple of options. First of all you could de-index the page by adding a meta NOINDEX tag. A second option would be use the cross-domain canoncical to the most prominent choice (page A or page B) typically whatever is closer to the top of the page.
If you have the opportunity to add unique content to the page, this might solve your problem. A couple hundred words could make the content unique and the page might have a chance of ranking on it's own and you wouldn't need to worry about canonicalization.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I wouldnt worry about duplicate issues too much unless its on the same domain. It would be my last thing to worry about, probably after fixing the new site. I have done it before on some projects so i understand how annoying this is.
Im wondering why he would want to put the same piece of content on SiteB on 2 separate pieces though...
You would want to put rel=canonical on the pages that have the content like the siteB content page pointing to the siteB mixed content
It's a bit vague but I hope I understood your situation correctly.
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
-
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Content incorrectly being duplicated on microsite
So bear with me here as this is probably a technical issue and i am not that technical. We have a microsite for one of our partner organisations and recently we have detected that content from our main site appearing in the URLs for the microsite - both in search results and then when you click through to the SERP. However, this content does not exist on the actual website at all. Anyone have a possible explanation for this? I have tried searching the web but nothing. I assume there is something in the set up of the microsite that is associating it with the content on the main site.
Technical SEO | | Discovery_SA0 -
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | | Wagada0 -
Duplicate Tag Content Mystery
Hello Moz Communtiy! i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like: http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/ http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/ Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this? Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one? If you have any video basis on it, i will recommend.
Technical SEO | | navneetkumar7860 -
Is this duplicate content?
All the pages have same information but content is little bit different, is this low quality and considered as duplicate content? I only trying to make services pages for each city, any other way for doing this. http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-pennsylvania/
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-jersey/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-connecticut/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-maryland/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-massachusetts/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-philadelphia/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york-city/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-baltimore/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-boston/0 -
Duplicate content on user queries
Our website supports a unique business industry where our users will come to us to look for something very specific (a very specific product name) to find out where they can get it. The problem that we're facing is that the products are constantly changing due to the industry. So, for example, one month, one product might be found on our website, and the next, it might be removed completely... and then might come back again a couple months later. All things that are completely out of our control - and we have no way of receiving any sort of warning when these things might happen. Because of this, we're seeing a lot of duplicate content issues arise... For Example... Product A is not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productA will return no results... Product B is also not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productB will also return no results. As per Moz Analytics, these are showing up as duplicate content because both pages indicate "No results were found for {your searched term}." Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to return a 204 in these situations (which I don't know if a 204 would help anyway) or a 404, because, for a faster user experience, we simultaneously render different sections of the page... so in the very beginning of the page load - we start rendering the faster content (template type of content) that says "returning 200 code, we got the query successfully & we're loading the page".. the unique content results finish loading last since they take the longest. I'm still very new to the SEO world, so would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help with this... I'm stuck. 😛 Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
Noindex duplicate content penalty?
We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit. Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site. In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Are multiple links devalued on the same domain?
I'm in negotiations to get links placed on a popular blog with good stats. I'm allowed to pick older posts on the site, and I get to pick the anchor text. Is it best practice to diversify the links by having different keywords pointing to different pages or am I better off pointing as many links as I can at one page (varying anchor text)? Also, is it best to pick a more recent blog post, or is it ok to pick one from say, 2009?
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0