Buying a disused website and using their content - penalty risk?
-
Hi all, I'm in the process of setting up a new website.
I have found various old websites covering a similar topic and I'm interested in purchasing two of these websites for their content as it is very good, despite those sites struggling to make ends meet.
One of these websites is still live, the other one hasn't been live for 2 years.
Let's say I bought these websites for their content, then used that content on my new domain and made sure the two websites where this content came from were offline, would I run a risk of getting penalised? Does Google hold onto content from a website even if it is now offline?
-
Brilliant, thanks Gaston
-
Hello Bee,
In my opinion, the non-risky way to use the other site content (owning that site) is removing that site from Google's index.
So, you should first (after buying those sites) apply noindex robots meta tag and wait intill there is no result whem performing a site:website.com search.Even though, be sure that other sites aren't using that content when you de index the first (and old) site. I've read some grey/black hat techniques that scrape web.archive.org looking for taken down sites' content.
Hope it helps.
GR. -
Thanks for the reply Roman, I probably wasn't clear. I'll try to clarify:
Say there is a websiteA.com which was established for years but then was taken down and hasn't been live for a couple of years. If I bought website A then rolled lots of its content into a new website, let's called it websiteB.com would I be risking any penalties on the new domain?
Thanks.
-
The answer is very simple, if you want to use the content of other website, and you are the owner just need to use Rel="canonical"
The process for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.
The rel=canonical attribute should be added to the HTML head of each duplicate version of a page, with the "URL OF ORIGINAL PAGE" portion above replaced by a link to the original (canonical) page. (Make sure you keep the quotation marks.) The attribute passes roughly the same amount of link equity (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and, because it's implemented at the page (instead of server) level, often takes less development time to implement.
Regards
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
-
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Website not ranking
Firstly, apologies for the long winded question. I'm 'newish' to SEO We have a website built on Magento , www.excelclothing.com We have been online for 5 years and had reasonable success. Having used a few SEO companies in the past we found ourselves under a 'partial manual penalty' early last year. By July we were out of penalty. We have been gradually working our way through getting rid of 'spammy' links. Currently the website ranks for a handful of non competitive keywords looking at the domain on SEM RUSH. This has dropped drastically over the last 2 years. Our organic traffic over the last 2-3 years has seen no 'falling off a cliff' and has maintained a similar pattern. I've been told so many lies by SEO companies trying to get into my wallet I'm not sure who to believe. We have started to add content onto all our Category pages to make more unique although most of our Meta Descriptions are a 'boiler plate' template. I'm wondering.... Am I still suffering from Penquin ? Am I trapped by Panda and if so how can I know that? Do I need more links removed? How can I start to rank for more keywords I have a competitor online with the same DA, PA and virtually same number of links but they rank for 3500 keywords in the top 20. Would welcome any feedback. Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wgilliland1 -
Blog content and panda?
If we want to create a blog to keep in front of our customers (via email and posting on social) and the posts will be around 300 - 1000 words like this site http://www.solopress.com/blog/ are we going to be asking for a panda slap as the issue would be the very little shares and traction after the first day or two. Also would panda only affect the blogs that are crap if we mix in a couple of really good posts or would it affect theses as well and possibly even the site? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Magento products and eBay - duplicate content risk?
Hi, We are selling about 1000 sticker products in our online store and would like to expand a large part of our products lineup to eBay as well. There are pretty good modules for this as I've heard. I'm just wondering if there will be duplicate content problems if I sync the products between Magento and eBay and they get uploaded to eBay with identical titles, descriptions and images? What's the workaround in this case? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Tabs and duplicate content?
We own this site http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ and just a little concerned as I right clicked open in new tab on the tab content section and it went to a new page For example if you right click on the price tab and click open in new tab you will end up with the url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson
http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree Does this mean that our content is being duplicated onto another page? If so what should I do?0 -
Re-using Content From a Previous Website - Risky?
Over the years, I've gathered thousands of user reviews on a website I am shutting down although I would like to keep them for another website. I removed the reviews from the old website, set the reviews pages to "noindex" and removed the pages from Google's index using the Webmaster Tools. At this point the reviews are not showing up in Google's search results anymore. Would there be any concerns about posting these reviews on a new website? Can it get penalized for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Duplicate Content Question
Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content. If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780