Is this considered duplicate content?
-
Hi Guys,
We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content.
The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words.
Here are the questions:
NOTE: the summaries are written by us, and not copied/pasted from other websites.
-
Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief?
-
Could this be beneficial as far as SEO?
-
If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links?
For example:
For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries:
<summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on.
TIA</summary>
-
-
we would recommend not using duplicated content marketing, as it can damage your businesses organic seo, instead write all of the work in a white hat way.
-
Hello kekepeche,
- Citing your sources is good practice & you'll;l avoid aby potential penalisation.
- Google is clever enough to 'know' the original [older] content source
- Use regular links since you're citing the original authors
- If you can get your writer to rewrite some source content to make it 80%+original this would be better for your SEO campaigns as it's technically original content so will rank better - Though, take care as not to infringe copyright
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
-
Duplication content management across a subdir based multisite where subsites are projects of the main site and naturally adopt some ideas and goals from it
Hi, I have the following problem and would like which would be the best solution for it: I have a site codex21.gal that is actually part of a subdirectories based multisite (galike.net). It has a domain mapping setup, but it is hosted on a folder of galike.net multisite (galike.net/codex21). My main site (galike.net) works as a frame-brand for a series of projects aimed to promote the cultural & natural heritage of a region in NW Spain through creative projects focused on the entertainment, tourism and educational areas. The projects themselves will be a concretion (put into practice) of the general views of the brand, that acts more like a company brand. CodeX21 is one of those projects, it has its own logo, etc, and is actually like a child brand, yet more focused on a particular theme. I don't want to hide that it makes part of the GALIKE brand (in fact, I am planning to add the Galike logo to it, and a link to the main site on the menu). I will be making other projects, each of them with their own brand, hosted in subsites (subfolders) of galike.net multisites. Not all of them might have their own TLD mapped, some could simply be www.galike.net/projectname. The project codex21.gal subsite might become galike.net/codex21 if it would be better for SEO. Now, the problem is that my subsite codex21.gal re-states some principles, concepts and goals that have been defined (in other words) in the main site. Thus, there are some ideas (such as my particular vision on the possibilities of sustainable exploitation of that heritage, concepts I have developed myself as "narrative tourism" "geographical map as a non lineal story" and so on) that need to be present here and there on the subsite, since it is also philosophy of the project. BUT it seems that Google can penalise overlapping content in subdirectories based multisites, since they can seem a collection of doorways to access the same product (*) I have considered the possibility to substitute those overlapping ideas with links to the main page of the site, thought it seems unnatural from the user point of view to be brought off the page to read a piece of info that actually makes part of the project description (every other child project of Galike might have the same problem). I have considered also taking the subsite codex21 out of the network and host it as a single site in other server, but the problem of duplicated content might persist, and anyway, I should link it to my brand Galike somewhere, because that's kind of the "production house" of it. So which would be the best (white hat) strategy, from a SEO point of view, to arrange this brand-project philosophy overlapping? (*) “All the same IP address — that’s really not a problem for us. It’s really common for sites to be on the same IP address. That’s kind of the way the internet works. A lot of CDNs (content delivery networks) use the same IP address as well for different sites, and that’s also perfectly fine. I think the bigger issue that he might be running into is that all these sites are very similar. So, from our point of view, our algorithms might look at that and say “this is kind of a collection of doorway sites” — in that essentially they’re being funnelled toward the same product. The content on the sites is probably very similar. Then, from our point of view, what might happen is we will say we’ll pick one of these pages and index that and show that in the search results. That might be one variation that we could look at. In practice that wouldn’t be so problematic because one of these sites would be showing up in the search results. On the other hand, our algorithm might also be looking at this and saying this is clearly someone trying to overdo things with a collection of doorway sites and we’ll demote all of them. So what I recommend doing here is really trying to take a step back and focus on fewer sites and making those really strong, and really good and unique. So that they have unique content, unique products that they’re selling. So then you don’t have this collection of a lot of different sites that are essentially doing the same thing.” (John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=kQIyk-2-wRg&feature=emb_logo)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PabloCulebras0 -
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Separating the syndicated content because of Google News
Dear MozPeople, I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better: *A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news? **B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right? So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important? This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lukas_TheCurious1 -
Top authors for ecommerce content
Hello, What are some tips that you recommend for someone looking to hire an expert to write or consult in a piece of content. It's as general a keyword as our niche has and it's the only keyword that's actually inside the niche that has any decent level of backlinks. We're considering searching out an expert in our field that knows more about the subject than our people do even though our people are knowledgable. Trying to come from authority. Your recommendations in the process of coming up with a great piece of content from a good authority?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How do I make a content calendar to increase my rank for a key word?
I've watched more than a few seminars on having a content calendar. Now I'm curious as to what I would need to do to increase ranking for a specific keyword in local SEO. Let's say I wanted to help them increase their rank for used trucks in buffalo, NY. Would I regularly publish blog posts about used trucks? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
On-site duplication working - not penalised - any ideas?
I've noticed a website that has been set up with many virtually identical pages. For example many of them have the same content (minimal text, three video clips) and only the town name varies. Surely this is something that Google would be against? However the site is consistently ranking near the top of Google page 1, e.g. http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-guildford.html for "magician Guildford", http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-ascot.html for "magician Ascot" and so on (even when searching without localisation or personalisation). For years I've heard SEO experts say that this sort of thing is frowned on and that they will get penalised, but it never seems to happen. I guess there must be some other reason that this site is ranked highly - any ideas? The content is massively duplicated and the blog hasn't been updated since 2012 but it is ranking above many established older sites that have lots of varied content, good quality backlinks and regular updates. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MagicianUK0 -
How does Google decide what content is "similar" or "duplicate"?
Hello all, I have a massive duplicate content issue at the moment with a load of old employer detail pages on my site. We have 18,000 pages that look like this: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=26626 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=36986 and Google is classing all of these pages as similar content which may result in a bunch of these pages being de-indexed. Now although they all look rubbish, some of them are ranking on search engines, and looking at the traffic on a couple of these, it's clear that people who find these pages are wanting to find out more information on the school (because everyone seems to click on the local information tab on the page). So I don't want to just get rid of all these pages, I want to add content to them. But my question is... If I were to make up say 5 templates of generic content with different fields being replaced with the schools name, location, headteachers name so that they vary with other pages, will this be enough for Google to realise that they are not similar pages and will no longer class them as duplicate pages? e.g. [School name] is a busy and dynamic school led by [headteachers name] who achieve excellence every year from ofsted. Located in [location], [school name] offers a wide range of experiences both in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities, we encourage all of our pupils to “Aim Higher". We value all our teachers and support staff and work hard to keep [school name]'s reputation to the highest standards. Something like that... Anyone know if Google would slap me if I did that across 18,000 pages (with 4 other templates to choose from)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a website with over 500 pages. The website is a home service website that services clients in different areas of the UK. My question is, am I able to take down the pages from my URL, leave them down for say a week, so when Google bots crawl the pages, they do not exist. Can I then re upload them to a different website URL, and then Google wont penalise me for duplicate content? I know I would of lost juice and page rank, but that doesnt really matter, because the site had taken a knock since the Google update. Thanks for your help. Chris,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chrisellett0