Duplicate Blog pages across different domains

[kiraftw]

Hey Moz Community,

I have 3 Duplicate websites which more or less contain the same blog article ( they are copy & paste from the original website ). I am now in the process of changing my duplicate websites and I stumbled upon this problem: if I have to change the content for all the duplicate articles I have across my different domains it would be a very time consuming task and on the other hand I don't want to no index, follow the duplicate articles because I want to use them for SEO purposes. Should I only change the articles that brought significant traffic and no index, follow the rest ?

What do you think ?

Thanks,

Anddrei

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Andrei,

I wholeheartedly agree with Ryan on this. When you say you have "3 separate blogs for 3 separate domains which are more or less identical", do you mean that the entire domains are nearly identical (which would be the case if these domains all stand-alone blogs.) Or is the content on each domain unique, with the exception of the blog? Let us know, thanks!

Christy

[RyanPurkey]

Duplicate content isn't supposed to have an SEO benefit. Thats why you're supposed to use rel canonical so your users visiting one blog can read the article as a usability feature while the search engines wan to know which one to rank. They're not interested in ranking all three of your identical articles. From their perspective it's a negative not a positive.

[kiraftw]

@TheZenAgency Basically I have 3 separate blogs for 3 separate domains which are more or less identical. Whenever I wrote an article I simply copy & paste on my other blogs, makes sense now ?

@Ryan I want to clean up the duplicate articles, but my dilemma is whether I should only change the content for the blog posts that brought me some traffic and simply use noindex/follow for my other articles in order to avoid a time consuming process. I was wondering if this would be the right approach in order to avoid a huge workload and at the same time keep the SEO benefits of the good articles ? What do you think Ryan ?

[RyanPurkey]

HI Anddrei. You'll definitely want to clean up the duplicate content either through rewrites or noindex / follow along with canonical tags on the one post that you do keep with the others pointing to that page as the canonical version.

Lastly, mentally don't plan on the duplicate content adding any SEO boost as distributing the exact same article across a variety of networks either through something like the old style of press releases or through domains you own is considered manipulative by the engines.  Cheers!

[TheZenAgency]

Hi Andrei

The first question i would ask is why do you have the same blog post on 3 different locations?