When is Duplicate Content Duplicate Content
-
Hi,
I was wondering exactly when duplicate content is duplicate content? Is it always when it is word-for-word or if it is similar? For example, we currently have an information page and I would like to add a FAQ to the website. There is, however, a crossover with the content and some of it is repeated. However, it is not written word for word. Could you please advise me?
Thanks a lot
Tom
-
We actually have 2 nearly identical ecommerce websites, with identical product descriptions, and prior to us doing a cross-domain canonical, we would frequently have both sites ranking in the top 20 for a keyword.
The cross domain canonical really helped - massive rankings increase.
-
Thank you ever so much, you've all been really helpful. Thanks a lot!!
-
Gary has pretty much hit the nail on the head. What you are proposing doesn't sound like it would cause any issues. Google are smart enough to know that sometimes there is a crossover of content. It might be a different story if every page was the same, but as I always advise in these situations, use a little common sense and think:
- Does the content add something beneficial?
- Why is the page being produced?
- Can what is being proposed, enhanced so it it not copied verbatim?
Make sure the page is well produced, questions clear and answers concise.
-Andy
-
As Gary said, it may not be harmful, yea.
But it bugs my eye to see issues like duplicate content in moz analytics.
Even if it's not that influential, it's the small things that make everything better.
Here is a nice piece of content from Ellie here on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-defeat-duplicate-content-next-level
If you feel like you need more content, here is everything on moz about duplicate content: https://moz.com/pages/search_results?q=duplicate+content
-
I had a conversation about this in a Google hangout with John Mueller, internal duplicate content is not an issue he said. Google will send a customer to the page it thinks is best.
Its only a problem if most of your content is poor quality and duplicated to create landing pages just to capture keywords.
Even external duplicate content is not that much of an issue as many sites have api's and affiliate schemes that have shared content, John Mueller says that if you are offering something different and unique additionally then that should be fine. Also we are seeing lots of content curating lately and Google seems to favor this too.
I see no reason at all for you to be worried, I would go ahead and add it to your FAQ.
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
-
Noticed a lot of duplicate content errors...
how do I fix duplicate content errors on categories and tags? I am trying to get rid of all the duplicate content and I'm really not sure how to. Any suggestions, advice and/or help on this would be greatly appreciated. I did add the canonical url through the SEO Yoast plugin, but I am still seeing errors. I did this on over 200 pages. Thanks for any assistance in advance. Jaime
Technical SEO | | slapshotstudio0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello guys, After fixing the rel tag on similar pages on the site I thought that duplicate content issue were resolved. I checked HTML Improvements on GWT and instead of going down as I expected, it went up. The duplicate issues affect identical product pages which differ from each other just for one detail, let's say length or colour. I could write different meta tags as the duplicate is the meta description, and I did it for some products but still didn't have any effects and they are still showing as duplicates. What would the problem be? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Duplicate content / title caused by CAPITALS
What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ). I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals Thanks Jon
Technical SEO | | jonny5123790 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
Caps in URL creating duplicate content
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Should I build a new site?
I'm currently working on a site which is built using Zen Cart. The client also has another version which has the same products on it. The product descriptions and the vast majority of the text has been re-written. I've used the duplicate content tool and these are the results: HTML fingerprint: 0000a7ee1f07a131 0000a7ec1f07a931 92.31% Total HTML similarity: 76.33% Standard text similarity: 66.72% Smart text similarity: 45.81% Total text similarity 56.27% I considered using a different eCommerce system like Magento or Volusion. So I had a look at a few templates, chose one and then used the tool again and got the following: HTML fingerprint: 0000a7e41b012111 0000a7ec1f07a931 72.00% Total HTML similarity: 64.65% Standard text similarity: 11.69% Smart text similarity: 17.90% Total text similarity 14.80% Do you think its worth doing this? thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | TheYeti0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0