What is the best way to resolve duplicate content issue
-
Hi
I have a client whose site content has been scraped and used in numerous other sites. This is detrimental to ranking. One term we wish to rank for is nowhere.
My question is this: what's the quickest way to resolve a duplicate content issue when other sites have stolen your content?
I understand that maybe I should firstly contact these site owners and 'appeal to their better nature'. This will take time and they may not even comply.
I've also considered rewriting our content. Again this takes time.
Has anybody experienced this issue before? If so how did you come to a solution?
Thanks in advance.
-
No worries Alex
I mean, contacting the webmasters would technically be simpler, but the chances that you're going to get a response, never mind a take-down of your content, is going to be pretty slim. Hence I suggested the rewriting.
It's a pain in the arse and requires you to do more work because of someone's laziness, which if course isn't right. But hopefully, with the fresh content and the tags in place, you'll be given the full credit.
In addition, if any of the content come in the form of blog posts, or if you'd like to do this site-wide, implementing a rel=author tag and verifying Google authorship would again be a signal to Google that your content is original. Here are a couple of handy guides to help with the markup:
http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218
http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-implement-the-relauthor-tag-a-step-by-step-guide/
-
Hi Tom
That's a great help.
I just wanted to ensure there wasn't a simpler solution besides rewriting the content. I guess that is the easiest and will ensure canonical tag solution is implemented too.
Thanks.
-
Hi Alex
I think the best solution here and the one that you can control the most is to rewrite the content and then ensure that your new content is seen as the originator.
Rewriting the content will take time, but obviously ensures that the content is unique, removing the duplicate content issue.
If I were you, I would then use a rel=canonical tag solution, so that every page (and new page) has a canonical tag on it.
Among other things, this will tell Google that your site is the originator of this content. Any other versions of it on your site or across the web is being used purely for user experience and therefore should not be ranked over the original.
As you will be publishing the content first, it should be crawled first by the search engines as well. To ensure that it is, I would also share your pages on social media when they go live, as it helps to index the pages much quicker.
This way, the site scraping your content should (in theory) not be able to rank for the content - or at the very least will be seen by Google as the copier of the content, while you will be seen as the originator, due to being indexed first with the canonical tag.
You can read more on canonicals with this handy Moz guide.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Category Page Content
Hey Mozzers, I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile" Above The Fold
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword. I cleaned this up to the following structure Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address. 1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories Any other critisms or comment welcome0 -
Duplicate Content, Same Company?
Hello Moz Community, I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations. For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc. They also have the same content on certain pages within each website. For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)? I hope this is clear. Thanks, Cole
On-Page Optimization | | ColeLusby0 -
Duplicate content: Form labels and field content
I have a site that has 500 pages, each with unique content, the only content that could be deemed the same is the 'Make Contact' form, which has the same labels and placeholder text on each page. Is this likely to cause any duplicate content penalties?
On-Page Optimization | | deployseo0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Boat broker - issues with duplicate content and indexing search results
Hello, I have read a lot about optimising product pages and not indexing search results or category pages as ideally a person should be directed straight to a product page. I am interested in how best to approach a site that is listing second hand products for sale - essentially a marketplace of second hand goods (in my case, www.boatshed.com - international boat brokers). For example, we currently have 5 Colvic Sailer 26 boats for sale across the world - that is 5 boats of the same make and model but differing years, locations, sellers and prices. My concern is with search results and 'category' pages. Unlike typical e-commerce sites, when someone searches for a 'Colvic sailer 26 for sale' I want them to go to a search results style page as it is more useful for them to see a list of boats than one random one that Google decides is most important (or possibly one it can match by location). Currently we have 3 different URL types to show search results style pages (i.e. paginated lists of boats that include name, image and short description):
On-Page Optimization | | pbscreative
manufacturer URL's e.g. http://www.boatshed.com/colvic-manufacturer-145.html
category URL's e.g. barges http://www.boatshed.com/barges-category-55.html
and normal search results e.g. dosearch.php?form_boattype_textbox=&.... I have noindexed the search results pages but our category and manufacturer URLs show up in search results and ultimately these are pages I want people to land on. I am however getting duplicate content warnings in Moz. Most boats are in several categories and all will come up on 1 manufacturer and one manufacturer and model page. Both sets of URL's are in my opinion needed; lots of users search for exact makes / models and lots of users just search for the type of boat e.g. 'barge for sale' so both sets of landing pages are useful. Any suggestions or thoughts greatly appreciated Thanks Ben0 -
Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Duplicate content on area specific sites
I have created some websites for my company Dor-2-Dor and there is a main website where all of the information across the board is on (www.dor2dor.com) but I also have area specific sites which are for our franchisees who run certain areas around the country (www.swansea.dor2dor.com or www.oxford.dor2dor.com) The problem is that the content that is on a lot of the pages is the same on all of them for instance our faq's page, special offers etc. What is the best way to get these pages to rank well and not have the duplicate content issues and be ranked down by search engines? Any help will be greatly received.
On-Page Optimization | | D2DWeb0 -
Website Content
Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0