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
-
Duplicate Content
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
Redirect question
Hi Everyone I've tried searching elsewhere in these forums for an answer to this but not having much luck - hope I'm not duplicating content! I get this message in Moz: "We have detected that the domain NappyValleyNet.com redirects to www.nappyvalleynet.com. We do not recommend tracking a redirect URL. Would you like to track www.nappyvalleynet.com for this campaign instead?" Is this a set-up issue on my side? I'm not sure what this means? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | NappyValleyNet0 -
On-Page Optimization Question
My company sells Blue widgets and we are located in Denver, CO. Keyword research indicates that the the highest volume phrase is "blue widgets for sale in denver co". Should my meta title tag be: Blue Widgets for sale in Denver CO , and my h1 tag be the same? or should they be semantic phrases? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | FicklingCompany0 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
URL Question
This url looks bad: http://www.patrickmunoz.com/#!classes/c1vw1 And when you click around the page change doesn't actually occur, it's a fade into the next page. I think this is a major problem for rankings. Although pages are crawled: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.patrickmunoz.com%2F&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j69i58j69i59l3j69i61.3548j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8 When I search for a simple page - "patrick munoz FAQs" nothing comes up:
On-Page Optimization | | tylerfraser
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.patrickmunoz.com%2F&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j69i58j69i59l3j69i61.3548j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=patrick+munoz+|+FAQs Do you think this is a bad url configuration? Thanks! Tyler0 -
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 -
Usability-question on 2 of my websites
Hi all, It has been a while since I have been in this forum, but that's normally a great sign 🙂 Anyway these days I'm work on a "face-lift" on a couple of my sites (www.krydsord.dk, www.bingoforum.dk and www.alutagrender.dk), but also this face-lift should be more than just that. Hopefully it will help the usability to be better, and as a result of that - I hope it will make it easier for my visitors to easily find what they are looking for. The question is: I would like to ad, say, 25 words of description (mouse-over) in my top menu buttons. Why? Because, I believe that it's a possible problem that the menu just says "krydsord" (crosswords) in stead of a describing text saying something about "Push this button and you will see a complete list of all the cross words on Krydsord.dk). This way, I get the chance to add more text (for the Search Engines) and to guide my visitors in a way that I'm not capable of with the limitations my top menus give me as they are at this moment. Naturally, my visitors should be able to easily decline this "extra information", once they have got it once. Is this completely way off, or do you like the idea? More specifically: Will this be annoying for the visitors, will it have any positive effect on SEO matters? Actually I got partly inspired during a SEOmoz webinar (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/designing-for-seo), even though it's not exactly what they are talking about in thwe webinar. For anybody who are curious (or just need to kill some time), you can have a look from 19:00 and watch it for about two minutes. Thanks a lot! Nicolai
On-Page Optimization | | MPO0 -
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues. All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Again Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0