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
-
Canonical Tags - Do they only apply to internal duplicate content?
Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | benj20341 -
Cross domain canonical issue
Hello fella SEOs! I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it? Thnx for your precious help guys!
Technical SEO | | SEObandits1 -
Duplicate content on report
Hi, I just had my Moz Campaign scan 10K pages out of which 2K were duplicate content and URL's are http://www.Somesite.com/modal/register?destination=question%2F37201 http://www.Somesite.com/modal/register?destination=question%2F37490 And the title for all 2K is "Register" How can i deal with this as all my pages have the register link and login and when done it comes back to the same page where we left and that it actually not duplicate but we need to deal with it propely thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicate Content - Reverse Phone Directory
Hi, Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors. Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position. Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain. I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
How different does content need to be to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
I'm implementing landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords. Some of them are substantially the same as another page (perhaps 10-15 words different). Are the landing pages likely to be identified by search engines as duplicate content? How different do two pages need to be to avoid the duplicate penalty?
Technical SEO | | WayneBlankenbeckler0 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0