How are they avoiding duplicate content?
-
One of the largest stores in USA for soccer runs a number of whitelabel sites for major partners such as Fox and ESPN. However, the effect of this is that they are creating duplicate content for their products (and even the overall site structure is very similar). Take a look at:
http://www.worldsoccershop.com/23147.html
http://www.foxsoccershop.com/23147.html
http://www.soccernetstore.com/23147.html
You can see that practically everything is the same including:
-
product URL
-
product title
-
product description
My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content? Have they coded for it in a certain way or is there something I'm missing which is helping them achieve rankings for all sites?
-
-
The answer is right in your question - "runs a number of whitelabel sites". As mentioned, it is largely due to the original publisher publishing the content first and getting indexed - from there, anytime the google bot stumbles across the same content - it will figure out that it has seen the content before, and attribute the ranking to the original. Something that google themselves covered last year here (although more specifically for news at the time).
Duplicate content unfortunately isn't just "not shown" by the search engines (imagine how "clean" the SERPS would be if that were the case!) it's just ranked lower than the original publisher that google is aware of. Occasionally you will get the odd page that will rank from a different domain - but that is usually due to being fresh content, I have seen this myself with my own content being aggregated by a large news site - they might outrank me on occasion for a day on one or two pieces - but my original url comes out on top in the end.
-
They rank as #1 for the relevant terms. It is very clear Google feels they are the original source of the content, and the other sites are duplicates.
I don't have a crystal ball to see the future, but based on current information, the original source site is not suffering in any manner.
-
Interesting feedback - are worldsoccershop (the original source) likely to suffer any penalties as a result of the whitelabel sites carrying the duplicate content?
-
Hey
I just did a search for some phrases I found on one of their product pages and I wrapped up this long query in double quotes.
"Large graffiti print on front that illustrates the club's famous players and history. The traditional blue jersey has gold details including team badge, adidas logo and sponsor design"
the results that are returned shows the worldsoccershop.com result first & second and therefore they seem to be an authority on this product description.
I have a client that is setting up a store to take on some rather big boys like notonthehighstreet.com and in this industry where they have several, established competitors for each product the big authority stores seem to rank for the generic product descriptions with no real issues.
This is ultimately difficult for the smaller stores as whilst they have less resources, pages on my clients site that use these duplicate descriptions are just getting filtered out of the results. We can see this filtering in action with very specific searches like the one above where we get the 'we have filtered out similar results' message in the search results and low and behold, my clients results are in those that are filtered.
So, to answer your original question:
They have not 'coded' anything in a specific way and there is nothing you are missing as such. They are just an authority site and as such are 'getting away with it' - which, for the smaller players, kind of sucks. That said, only the worldofsoccer pages are returned so the other sites could well be filtered out.
Still, as I am coaching our client, see this not as a problem but as an opportunity. By creating unique content, we can hopefully piggy back other more authoritative sites that are all returning an exact same product description and whilst I don't expect us to get 1st place, we can work towards first page and out of that filter.
Duplicate content is a massive problem and on this site we are working on there is one product description that copyscape tells us is on 300 other sites. Google wants to return rich result sets, some shops, some information, some pictures etc and not just 10 sets of the same thing so dare to be different and give them a reason to display your page.
Hope it helps
Marcus -
My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content?
Why do you feel this content has not been flagged as duplicate content?
The reasonable search for these pages is Barcelona Soccer Jersey. Only one of the three sites has results for this term in the top 50, and it is the #1 and #2 results. If this was not duplicate content, you would expect to find the other two sites listed on the first page of google results as well.
The perfect search for the page (very longtail and unrealistic) is Barcelona 11/12 home soccer jersey. For this result, the worldsoccershop.com site ranks as #1 and 3, the foxsoccershop ranks as #8 which is a big drop down considering the content is the same, and the soccernetstore.com site is not in the top 50 results.
The other two sites have clearly been identified as duplicate content or are otherwise being penalized quite severely.
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
-
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
Duplicate content across similar computer "models" and how to properly handle it.
I run a website that revolves around a niche rugged computer market. There are several "main" models for each computer that also has several (300-400) "sub" models that only vary by specifications for each model. My problem is I can't really consolidate each model to one product page to avoid duplicate content. To have something like a drop down list would be massive and confusing to the customer when they could just search the model they needed. Also I would say 80-90% of the market searches for a specific model when they go to purchase or in Google. A lot of our customers are city government, fire departments, police departments etc. they get a list of approved models and purchase off that they don't really search by specs or "configure" a model so each model number having a chance to rank is important. Currently we have all models in each sub category rel=canonical back to the main category page for that model. Is there a better way to go about this? Example page you can see how there are several models all product descriptions are the same they only vary by model writing a unique description for each one is an unrealistic possibility for us. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated I keep going back on forth on what the correct solution would be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Rugged_Store0 -
Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhothouse
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Duplicate Content: Organic vs Local SEO
Does Google treat them differently? I found something interesting just now and decided to post it up http://www.daviddischler.com/is-duplicate-content-treated-differently-when-local-seo-comes-into-play/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
Hi there! I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now. In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly : http://{some-city}.duproprio.com This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords. But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains... Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority? Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic? Thanks a big lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DuProprio.com0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0 -
Subdomains - duplicate content - robots.txt
Our corporate site provides MLS data to users, with the end goal of generating leads. Each registered lead is assigned to an agent, essentially in a round robin fashion. However we also give each agent a domain of their choosing that points to our corporate website. The domain can be whatever they want, but upon loading it is immediately directed to a subdomain. For example, www.agentsmith.com would be redirected to agentsmith.corporatedomain.com. Finally, any leads generated from agentsmith.easystreetrealty-indy.com are always assigned to Agent Smith instead of the agent pool (by parsing the current host name). In order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, any page that is viewed on one of the agent subdomains always has a canonical link pointing to the corporate host name (www.corporatedomain.com). The only content difference between our corporate site and an agent subdomain is the phone number and contact email address where applicable. Two questions: Can/should we use robots.txt or robot meta tags to tell crawlers to ignore these subdomains, but obviously not the corporate domain? If question 1 is yes, would it be better for SEO to do that, or leave it how it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0