Who gets punished for duplicate content?
-
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
-
Neither. Duplicate content is not a punishment. It is a relevance issue. Google simply thinks the duplicate site is a clone of many sites and there irrelevant. Some sites with greater authority it does work for - but google will only pick one site to display. Hence the other site considers it a punishment as they have the same content - but not displayed.
Think of it in fashion, people do not usually line of for mass market product, they line up for the limited edition. Google does not want to show mass market, the same thing over and over again - it wants to show unique relevant content.
-
Hi Thomas,
The ill-effect of duplicate content isn't always logical, but generally it follows certain rules. Firstly, it's not so much a 'punishment', as search engines' confusion: if two pages are showing the same content, how does it know which result is going to be better for the user? Google, for example, are forced to choose what they think the best result will be, and if there's duplicate content it lessens your chances of being chosen.
Google don't specifically give penalties for duplicate content, but some practices are risky, for example scraping content from websites without permission. It depends how the content has been duplicated. (See this video from Google's John Mueller)
This post on Moz also clarifies the issues around duplicate content very well.
What type of duplicate content are you worried about? Do you own both of the websites for which you're worried?
Thanks, hope this helps.
Zoe
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
-
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Javascript tabbed navigation and duplicate content
I'm working on a site that has four primary navigation links and under each is a tabbed navigation system for second tier items. The primary link page loads content for all tabs which are javascript controlled. Users will click the primary navigation item "Our Difference" (http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference) and have several options with each tabs content in separate sections. Each second tier tab is also available via sitemap/direct link (ie http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference/Tree-Logistics) without the js navigation so the content on this page is specific to the tab, not all tabs. In this scenario, will there be duplicate content issues? And, what is the best way to remedy this? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Duplicate Content Issue within the Categories Area
We are in the process of building out a new website, it has been built in Drupal. Within the scan report from SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics and it look like I have a duplicate content issue. Example: We sell Vinyl Banners so we have many different templates one can use from within our Online Banner Builder Tool. We have broken them down via categories: Issue: Duplicate Page Content /categories/activities has 9 other URLS associated this issue, I have many others but this one will work for an example. Within this category we have multiple templates attached to this page. Each of the templates do not need their own page however we use this to pull the templates into one page onto the activities landing page. I am wondering if I need to nofollow, noindex each of those individule templates and just get the main top level category name indexed. Or is there a better way to do this to minimize the impact of Panda?
Technical SEO | | Ben-HPB0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0