Duplicate content question
-
Hi
I have a site that is run off one CMS system but has 3 different web addresses. One is a comic shop, one is a toy shop and one is a game shop. Now due to the nature of what we are selling some of the products we are selling on both or all 3 of the sites.
I was wondering as to whether this would affect my ability to rank in google and if i would be penalised for any duplicate content?
Thanks in advance
-
One trick you can do is dilute the text pretty easily and make some small changes to make them compete with each other instead of one canceling two out like a duplicate content will get you. You could try something like this and it should be pretty easy to implement if you are using a template based cart system.
Shop 1 - Just have the normal product description on the page and all of the standard text you have from your menu, ect basically changing nothing.
Shop 2 - If your site is utilizing rich snippets, change them on a template level. Most work like this $template_variable So on the second site delete a little bit of the rich snippet data, say the condition and the manufacturer name. At the same time on every product page add a 200-400 word shipping and return policy. As the current standards are, that should dilute everything enough to look like a totally different page.
Shop 3 - Basically the same as shop 2, change the rich snippet data that is sent a little. Maybe it could be adding manufacturer data that is not in the other templates, or taking something else that is non essential out of the template. Then add in on the product pages a different but meaning the same 100-200 word shipping policy. At the same time either add in an "about" section for the manufacturer, or if you have too many manufacturers for this to be reasonable add in an about for your company on every product page.
By doing this you will make the pages compete with each other instead of making one page dominate. If you are using a template based CMS, the changes should be easy and should only take about an hr or two to do, minus the time to write the content.
-
Highland has a very good answer to this for sure. But i'd like to add something. We are magento specialists and work with a lot of multi-store environments, i'd say follow the following steps
- Best case: try to write unique copy per website with the same product and title. this would be fine, as long as the content is really unique on all 3 sites you have 3 ranking opportunities in stead of one.
- Else: If thats costs to much time or effort and does not give you enough ROI just choose highland's method of setting a canonical tag to you most powerful domain which is more likely to rank
- If thats to much time just forget it and let google fight it out, it wont give you much devaluation
-
It's not a penalty per se, it just means that Google is going to pick one copy and devalue the others. Does it affect your ability to rank? Not really. It just means one site is going to be the winner. Remember, a penalty is where Google devalues your whole site for bad behavior. Duplicate content is not bad behavior.
If you want to pick the rankings winner yourself you can add a canonical tag to the other pages pointing to the one you want to rank.
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
-
Title-Tag question
The Yoast plugin is installed on the website. It generates the following meta property tag when I enter a new title-tag in the plugin: Next to that I have my standard title-tag. <title>dummy</title> Is this meta property tag able to replace the title-tag? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
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 -
Duplication in landing page
This is driving me mad, I have a site that for some reason google and moz pick up the landing page as a duplicate. They see "mysite/" and "mysite/index.html" as two different pages and giving me warnings for duplication. I have no 301 included at this time and I am using foundation as the base. This is occurring both on a localhost test bed and live....... anyone got an idea how to correct.
On-Page Optimization | | AndyBirtles0 -
Social Media Profile and Website content dupe content issues ?
Is there a dupe content issue if your social media profiles and website have same content/copy ? For example if you have written great copy for your website home page then literally copy & paste that into your G+ co page introduction (since sums everything up perfectly and don't want to change it) would that have a negative effect or be perfectly ok ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
I have a lot of internal duplicate content as intros to a series of articles, is this bad?
On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"): And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site 🙂 but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate. http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour1 -
Static content VS Dynamic changing content what is best
We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages. We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews. Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed? We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Meta descriptions better empty or with duplicate content?
I am working with a yahoo store. Somehow all of the meta description fields were filled in with random content from throughout the store. For example, a black cabinet knob product page might have in its description field the specifications for a drawer slide. I don't know how this happened. We have had a programmer auto populate certain fields to get them ready for product feeds, etc. It's possible they screwed something up during that, this was a long time ago. My question. Regardless of how it happened. Is it better for me to have them wipe these fields entirely clean? Or, is it better for me to have them populate the fields with a duplicate of our text from the body. The site has about 6,500 pages so I have and will make custom descriptions for the more important pages after this process, but the workload to do them all is too much. So, nothing or duplicate content for the pages that likely won't receive personal attention?
On-Page Optimization | | dellcos1 -
Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content?
Older reads state the domain forwarding or masking will create duplicate content but Google has evolved quite a bit and I'm wondering if that is still the case? Not suggesting that a 301 is not the proper way to redirect something but my question is: Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content? Is there any viable use for domain masking other than for affiliates?
On-Page Optimization | | TracyWeb0