How to avoid duplicate content
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Hi there,
Our client has an ecommerce website, their products are also showing on an aggregator website (aka on a comparison website where multiple vendors are showing their products). On the aggregator website the same photos, titles and product descriptions are showing.
Now with building their new website, how can we avoid such duplicate content? Or does Google even care in this case? I have read that we could show more product information on their ecommerce website and less details on the aggregator's website. But is there another or better solution?
Many thanks in advance for any input!
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yes, since you are not changing domain name and keeping the same content, you should be fine, since you were original author of that content
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Unfortunately we can't control the content on the aggregator website (e.g. with rel="canonical" etc.)
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Hi there,
No we can't control what is being put on the aggregator website (chrono24.com, a large website displaying watches from different dealers).
We won't be changing domain names, copying over all product content, just restyling and adding new content in the about us/services pages.
So I assume the only option is to have Google index our content first. Thanks for the video!
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Hi there.
Can you control what is being put on aggregator website? if so - there shouldn't be any problem, right - just make it different. If you can't control aggregated material - usually Google relies on date/time of indexing pages to find out who copied from whom. So what you can do is after creating new pages for products etc., go to webmaster tools and go "fetch as google" to insure that your website would be crawled first.
You said that you're doing new website. Are you changing domain names? Are you copying all content over without any changes? or you just restyling?
Anyway, idea stays the same - either make content different from aggregator website or make sure that your website is being crawled first. Oh, depending on how your content is being scraped, you can utilize canonical links (if aggregator simply copies full page into iframes or something).
P.S. I'm trying to find a video from matt cutts about websites being indexed earlier than original content.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q
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Anytime where you have known duplicate content you want to use the rel = "canonical" tag to signify the original content, and rel = "alternate" href = "http://otherDomainWithDupContent.com"
More info in Google Webmaster Documentation for Duplicate Content
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html
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