Percentage of duplicate content allowable
-
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google?
For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse?
If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content?
thanks!
-
I dont believe you have aproblem if you havea bit of duplicate content, google does not penilize you for duplicate content, it just dosent award you points for it.
-
That sounds like something Google will hate by default. Your problem there is page quantity to quality and uniqueness ratio.
-
It's quite difficult to provide the exact data as Google algorithm is Google's hidden treasure. Better to keep yourself safe by creating completely unique content, Referring to your example of Wikipedia definition, you can add something like " ACCORDING TO WIKIPEDIA ..... " while copying definition or adding reference links while copying any content from other sources.
Remember that Google is not only giving importance to unique content but it should be of high quality. That means the article should be innovative like a complete new thing & well researched, so it mustn't be of 200 or less words. So Google will compare the quality of the whole article with the copied content & then it'll decide whether it's a duplicate content article or not.
-
We recently launched a large 3500 page website that auto generates a sentence after we plug in statistical data in our database.
So the only unique content is a single sentence?
Within that sentence many of the words would need to be common as well. Consider a simple site that offered the population for any given location. "The population of [California] is [13 million] people."
In the above example only 3 words are unique. Maybe your pages are a bit more elaborate but it seems to me those pages are simply not indexable. What you can do is index the main page where users can enter the location they wish to learn about, but not each possible result (i.e. California).
Either add significantly more content, or only index the main page.
-
We recently launched a large 3500 page website that auto generates a sentence after we plug in statistical data in our database. All pages are relevant to users and provide more value than other results in serps, but i think a penalty is in place that the farmer update may have detected with a sort of auto-penalty against us.
I sent in a reconsideration request last week, the whole project is on hold until we get a response. I'm expecting a generic answer from them.
We are debating on either writing more unique content for every page or entering in more statistical data to run some cool correlations. The statistical data would be 3x more beneficial to the user I feel, but unique content is what Google seeks and a safer bet just to get us indexed properly.
-
We're currently observing a crumbling empire of websites with auto-generated content. Google is somehow able to understand how substantial your content is and devalue the page and even the whole site if it does not meet their criteria. This is especially damaging for sites who have say 10% of great unique content and 90% of their pages are generated via tagging, browsable search and variable driven paragraphs of text.
Having citations is perfectly normal but I would include reference section just in case.
-
You can have some duplicate content in the manner you mentioned above. It is a natural and expected part of the internet that existing sources of information will be utilized.
There is not any magic number which says "30% duplication is ok, but 31% is not". Google's algorithms are private and constantly changing. Use good sense to guide you as to whether your page is unique and offers value to users.
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
-
On Site Question: Duplicate H2...
Hi All A few on-site audit tools pull information on duplicate H2 tags on pages. This implies it's a bad thing and should be fixed - is that the case? On one of my sites the tag-line is in H2 in the header, so appears on every page... Just wondering if this is something worth fixing. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | GTAMP0 -
Long list of companies spread out over several pages - duplicate content?
Hi all, I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future. Here are two pages as examples: http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1# http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1# Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD&number=06630333#.U8PW6_ldX1s Thanks in advance Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | AaronGro0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Duplicate Content - Delete it or NoIndex?
Last month I realized that one of my freelancers had been feeding my website with copied / spun content and sadly, there's lots of it. And of course it got my website to be hit hard by the last Panda update. Now that I've identified the content, what the best thing to do? Should I delete it permanently and get 404 errors or should I set the pages' robot meta tag to "nofollow"?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Ecommerce: content on category pages
I have to optimize some online Shops and after Panda I really don't know what to think about thin content on product overview pages anymore... used to be that we could improve our rankings easily just by adding 1-2 sentences on such a page. This always worked for non-overly competitive terms. Now It feels like it doesn't work any longer, but I couldn't put my finger on it and I don't have the resources to test. Here's an example of what I mean: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/wandtattoos/aus_aller_welt.html
On-Page Optimization | | zeepartner
I would add max. 3 lines of text directly over the product thumbnails. What do you think? Is it worth adding some text on a product overview page or do I not even have to bother post-Panda?0 -
Duplicate Product BUT Unique Content -- any issues?
We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer). Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different. Any issues?
On-Page Optimization | | SEOPA1