If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
-
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
-
You bet Mitch! Glad to help and let me know if there's anything else I can help answer. Hopefully maybe you'll get a few other opinions as well. As I'm sure you know, that's often valuable in search with so many nuances to the SEO game.
Good luck with your search efforts!
-
Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.
-
Really helpful thoughts all around. Sounds like we might continue to no-index the content for now (we assume that the descriptions of the programs are duplicate, since there's no way for us to efficiently check if people uploading program listings are just copy-pasting from their website -- reviews usually are the unique piece of content that allows us to move a page from noindexed to indexed).
Also, thanks for bringing the leave-a-review URLs to our attention -- I'll bring it up with my team this week!
Thanks again, Todd!
-
Did that help, Mitch?
-
Hey Mitch,
Thanks for the clarification--I think I understand your situation a little better now. Let me ask you this, are the pages your reviews sit on significantly different than the pages with the same reviews that your competitors have? Meaning, is the only cross-over the review portion of the content?
To answer your adjusted question, I would personally say no--review content is not different than any other type of content that could be construed as duplicate. I am wondering if you could solve your issue by differentiating the pages you have with reviews that match your competitors by adding other types of content to them. This might help add valuable context for a search engine as well as differentiate the page enough to help an engine sort out that they are different even though there is some content overlap. Just a thought.
My other thought on this is that maybe it's worth setting up a test? This is certainly a gray area and there are probably people who would have differing opinions from mine, so perhaps a good next step is planning and working on a test to see what happens with a small portion of pages?
If the content isn't thin, it sounds like you shouldn't have an issue with an algo like panda, so I don't see a huge risk in the test from what I understand of your situation.
If I've got your site right, I'm guessing you're asking about pages like this: http://www.gooverseas.com/study-abroad/austria/ies-abroad/47342 and whether or not you'd allow them to be indexed because the reviews at the bottom might be on other review sites. Again, if the content on the rest of the page is significant and not the same as what's on other similar pages, I wouldn't worry to much about it. If it is, I'd run a test and see what you can do.
Without doing more research, that's the best I can offer at this point!
Oh, and you might want to look into this (2 of many)...
That does look like something that would get you hit by panda.
Hope that helps and sorry if I'm still not understanding the question correctly.
-
Understood -- however, 1. It provides value and matches common user queries (i.e. "University of Michigan study abroad program reviews -- just made that exact query up though) 2. It's not lean content; we only think about indexing these pages when there are enough in-depth reviews (i.e paragraphs not a line or two). 3. I totally understand that that's usually the problem with duplicate content, but our competitors are ranking for these because we're being cautious of potential future algo updates and they're not -- so regardless of the fact that we're putting the content up first, they're getting the points.
My question is more along the lines of: is review content / user generated content treated differently than you traditional duplicate blog post? Is it OK if we index this page with reviews even though our competitor has already done so?
-
Personally, if they don't provide value for someone searching, I'd leave them noindexed. No reason to run the risk of an algo adjustment because of thin content. Duplicate content is mostly an issue because it makes it hard for search engines to determine which version to rank.
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
-
Technical Site Migration
Hello All- I have been in the SEO industry for about 4 years and feel fairly confident in my technical SEO; however, I am being asked to conduct a migration that is both a platform change (step 1) then a consolidation change (think of combining websites when a company is acquired) all within a 4-5 month time span. I feel like as I begin to create this multi-step checklist I would love to hear of others that have gone through something similar or have resources you could point me to form more of a process/procedure standpoint. Again - I feel confident in the technical output but I have a fairly junior team and want to execute this smoothly. Feel free to add recommendations or ask for clarification if my discussion question doesn't make sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instructure0 -
Updating 2013 Site Built with Custom Theme, Modify Existing Theme, Create New Custom Theme, Or Use Child Theme?
Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create a new custom theme
3. Create a child theme Thanks,
Alan0 -
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Merging three sites to one
Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.0 -
Scapers and Other Sites Outranking
Post panda, there is definitely more talk about scrapers or other (more authoritative) sites outranking the original content creators in the SERPS. The most common way this problem is addressed (from what I've seen) is by rewriting the content and try your hardest to be the first one to be indexed or just ignoring it from an on page standpoint and do more link dev. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to address? Should site owners be looking deeper into their analytics and diagnostics before doing the rewrites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820