Duplicate content issue, across site domains (blogging)
-
Hi all,
I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs.
http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website.I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice!
Ketan
-
Ketan,
I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree?
If you look at pretty much any of the blog posts on these forums you will see that more and more everything comes back to content. Original content. Original Content. Did I mention original content? EGOL shared a link with me and I'm sharing it again on another post but it's pertinent.
http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/
Content used to be king and he wants his thrown back!
Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog?
Duplicate content is something that I am working a lot with right now. There is a difference between duplicate content and plagiarism. What needs to be determined is how the are using this content. Matt Cutts said that roughly 25% of the internet is duplicate content, and a lot of duplicate content is ok, for example if you were writing an analysis, or writing commentary on one of those blog posts then of course there is going to be some duplicate content. That sort of this would be ok.
If they are simply taking the article, and posting it, yet still giving credit, then no its not really doing anything except potentially giving your blog traffic. Take social bookmarking websites for example. Let's look at digg.com. A long time ago digg used to take the entire article and post it to their page and you could actually view everything within their website and everything was all gravy. Now, that doesn't work so well. Now, digg usually writes a little blurb, and provides a link.
Google will look at duplicate content, determine which ever is the best representation of the content, usually who wrote it first, who has the strongest domain etc, and gives the credit to them. The other thing too is that these websites, Havard, NPR, etc have in their favor is that they are prob indexed often enough to guarantee that they are going to get credit first.
As to the question about deleting them. I don't think you necessarily need to delete them, depending on how many articles exist, how much traffic they generate etc. There is a lot to look at. If nobody is looking at them, then sure, you can always do a 301 to one of your new blog posts later down the line. Or maybe your first posts are rewrites or analysis of the articles. Regardless I would provide a link on all of the pages letting people know where you got the information, that way nobody can say you were trying to steal the information.
My thought on this whole thing. If it makes you uncomfortable, it's gonna make Google feel uncomfortable.
Hope that helps! Good luck!
Matt Cutts on Duplicate content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA&feature=kp
Matt Cutts on Original content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q
-
Do they use canonical URLs on their website? Do the cross-posted blog posts have canonicals that point back to the originating site? If so, the duplicate content should not harm their website and their website should rank above the bigger players for their content (though not necessarily--Google works in mysterious ways).
In general, it is a good idea to keep your best, fresh content on your own website but sometimes it can be good to get the added exposure of a high-traffic website, assuming that it is clear where the content originated.
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
-
Old domain to new domain what happens to the old site?
Hello We rebranded 5 months ago, and set up a new domain for the new brand name which sits on different hosting to the old. We still have the old hosting running with the old site still on it. We have set up redirects to the new domain and wondered when/if we can turn off the old site hosting?
On-Page Optimization | | Scivisum0 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
What are the Best On-Site SEO Practices before an E-commerce Site Goes Live?
Hello, I’m working on a client’s E-commerce website. This website is not live yet. Before the site goes live, I am curious to know what the best practices of On-site SEO are. Please let me know from which factor should I start analyze? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | TopLeagueTechnologies0 -
Duplicate content - Opencart
In my last report I have a lot of duplicate content. Duplicate pages are: http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=Сваров�% http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=бижу http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=бижузо�%8 And a lot of more, starting with -- http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag= Any ideas? Maybe I should do something in robots.txt, but please tell me the exact code. Best Regards, Emil
On-Page Optimization | | famozni0 -
Do https sites rank as well as http sites?
2 Questions: Question 1 - We currently have our entire site running on https (the http pages 301-redirect to the https versions). Assuming that the https pages load as quickly as the http versions, is it a problem that the entire site is https? The only official answer I've been able to find is this 2011 video where Matt Cutts basically says "I don't know" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M Question 2 - Is there any problem with having half our site running on https only (with the http pages redirected), and the other half (our blog) running on http only (with all https blog pages redirected to the http versions)? Thanks in advance for any input! Justin
On-Page Optimization | | JustinClark0 -
Strategies for revising my duplicate content?
New to SEO and SEOmoz. I tried searching for this first and I'm sure it's on here but I could not find it. I have a site that markets fishing charters in a few dozen cities. Up to now I was relying on PPC and using each city page as a landing page of sorts. Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people. Site is www.vipfishingcharters.com Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NoahC0 -
Duplicate Content Warning
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the duplicate content warnings I am recieving for some of my pages. I noticed that the below pattern of URLs are being flagged as duplicate content. I understand that these are seen as two different pages but I would like to know if this has an negative impact on my SEO? Why is this happening? How do I stop it from happening? http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html?sef_rewrite=1 http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | mozmonkey0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5