Does posting a source to the original content avoid duplicate content risk?
-
A site I work with allows registered user to post blog posts (longer articles).
Often, the blog posts have been published earlier on the writer's own blog. Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content?
Thanks!
-
I don't know what Roger says, but I believe that followed links on noindex pages will pass PageRank, anchor text and other link benefits. Your instructions are to "no index" but the page will still be crawled.
-
Hi EGOL.
If you noindex pages and other sites link to them, do you benefit from that or not?
Do you see any pagerank on those, that are old enough to show it?
What does Roger say about those?
-
I publish other people's content. That caused a Panda problem about a year ago - which I was able to recover from by noindexing those pages. Now I noindex / follow any content that I publish that appears on another website.
The articles that I write are published on my own site only.
-
I'm concerned about what's best for my site -and would therefore not post other peoples content - so i've never had to deal with this
I guess if I owned both sites i would prefer to cross canonical the duped pages to my other site
If i didn't own the other site i would probably just opt to noindex follow that page i guess -
The last question in the text is......
Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the
rel="canonical"link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While therel="canonical"link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible. -
Egol,
The Matt Cutts video seems to say you can't canonicalize between two totally different domains. So, we couldn't use a canonical for that.
-
Canonicalling them will give the benefit to the author's original page. It does not have benefit for you.
If you want them to rel=canonical for you then it is good to do it for them.
-
If you want to avoid panda with content on your own site then you can noindex, follow those pages.
Your visitors will be able to use them but they will not appear in the search engines.
-
Hey Egol, What is the benefit of canonicalling to them over just meta noindex,following the page?
-
So, you're not saying rel canonical to their page?
What if we just no-follow pages on our site that author originally published on their site? Right now we link to it as orginally published on ....
I'm trying to avoid a Panda penalty for non-unique blog posts reposted on our site.
-
I have used rel=canonical to reduce duplicate content risk. However, more important, the rel=canonical gives credit to the page where it points.
One problem with guest posting is that to reduce duplicate content risk and transfer credit to your own site, you must have the site owners cooperation.
Of course, you can get author credit by linking the post to your Google+ profile - if you think that has value.
-
Hi,
Thanks, Egol
So, on a page of ours where someone re-posts their blog post on our site, we'd add a canonical tag on our page to point to their original page? That would be a canonical tag between two different domains. I didn't think that was okay.
And, if we did that, we wouldn't be risking some kind of Panda duplicate content penalty?
Thanks!
-
"Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content?"
No. To prevent that you need to use the rel=canonical.
See Matt Cutts video here....
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
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
-
Impact of wiping content on a subdomain
Hi, I've been asked to look at the impact of bulk deleting content on a blog subdomain and how it could impact the SEO of a linked www subdomain. Can deleting content on one subdomain have a negative impact on other linked subdomains? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | think-web0 -
We've just completed a company video. Should we post it everywhere at once, or stagger on various channels (YouTube, website, LinkedIn, Facebook...)
Hopefully we'll get a lot of traffic from our new corporate video. If we post it everywhere at once, will we get a spike in our analytics, and if so, will it be seen by Google as an anomaly, or even suspicious. If we spread out the distribution over several channels over a little time, should we get a longer bump. In either instance, we may consider a sharing schedule to promote it over time.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveMauldin0 -
What are effective ways of finding people to link to my blog post?
So I spent ages creating amazing content and have loads of interest in it from my social media and people visiting my site are reading deep into it. I have so far not been able to get anyone to link to it. What am I doing wrong???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Spam report duplicate images
Should i do a spam report if a site competitor as copied my clinical cases images and placed as their own clinical cases. That site also does not have privacy policy or medical doctor on that images. My site: http://www.propdental.es/carillas-de-porcelana/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Creating duplicate site for testing purpose. Can it hurt original site
Hello, We are soon going to upgrade the cms to latest version along with new functionlaities - the process may take anywhere from 4 week to 6 weeks. may suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: / , User-agent: Bing Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check url using screaming frog or xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain The process upgradation and new tools may take 1 - 1.5 month.... Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing & Yahoo through User agent disallow - can still the url can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi1 -
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 -
Guest Post Blogging And Exchanging Links
Hi, I hope you are all well. Would there be any problem with exchanging a guest blog, so two websites doing a guest post for each other and both sites linking back to each other. I don't think this would be an issue on a small scale though I just wanted to see what everyone else thought. Are there any other things I should bear in mind when doing this as well? Kind Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0