If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
-
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
-
You bet Mitch! Glad to help and let me know if there's anything else I can help answer. Hopefully maybe you'll get a few other opinions as well. As I'm sure you know, that's often valuable in search with so many nuances to the SEO game.
Good luck with your search efforts!
-
Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.
-
Really helpful thoughts all around. Sounds like we might continue to no-index the content for now (we assume that the descriptions of the programs are duplicate, since there's no way for us to efficiently check if people uploading program listings are just copy-pasting from their website -- reviews usually are the unique piece of content that allows us to move a page from noindexed to indexed).
Also, thanks for bringing the leave-a-review URLs to our attention -- I'll bring it up with my team this week!
Thanks again, Todd!
-
Did that help, Mitch?
-
Hey Mitch,
Thanks for the clarification--I think I understand your situation a little better now. Let me ask you this, are the pages your reviews sit on significantly different than the pages with the same reviews that your competitors have? Meaning, is the only cross-over the review portion of the content?
To answer your adjusted question, I would personally say no--review content is not different than any other type of content that could be construed as duplicate. I am wondering if you could solve your issue by differentiating the pages you have with reviews that match your competitors by adding other types of content to them. This might help add valuable context for a search engine as well as differentiate the page enough to help an engine sort out that they are different even though there is some content overlap. Just a thought.
My other thought on this is that maybe it's worth setting up a test? This is certainly a gray area and there are probably people who would have differing opinions from mine, so perhaps a good next step is planning and working on a test to see what happens with a small portion of pages?
If the content isn't thin, it sounds like you shouldn't have an issue with an algo like panda, so I don't see a huge risk in the test from what I understand of your situation.
If I've got your site right, I'm guessing you're asking about pages like this: http://www.gooverseas.com/study-abroad/austria/ies-abroad/47342 and whether or not you'd allow them to be indexed because the reviews at the bottom might be on other review sites. Again, if the content on the rest of the page is significant and not the same as what's on other similar pages, I wouldn't worry to much about it. If it is, I'd run a test and see what you can do.
Without doing more research, that's the best I can offer at this point!
Oh, and you might want to look into this (2 of many)...
That does look like something that would get you hit by panda.
Hope that helps and sorry if I'm still not understanding the question correctly.
-
Understood -- however, 1. It provides value and matches common user queries (i.e. "University of Michigan study abroad program reviews -- just made that exact query up though) 2. It's not lean content; we only think about indexing these pages when there are enough in-depth reviews (i.e paragraphs not a line or two). 3. I totally understand that that's usually the problem with duplicate content, but our competitors are ranking for these because we're being cautious of potential future algo updates and they're not -- so regardless of the fact that we're putting the content up first, they're getting the points.
My question is more along the lines of: is review content / user generated content treated differently than you traditional duplicate blog post? Is it OK if we index this page with reviews even though our competitor has already done so?
-
Personally, if they don't provide value for someone searching, I'd leave them noindexed. No reason to run the risk of an algo adjustment because of thin content. Duplicate content is mostly an issue because it makes it hard for search engines to determine which version 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
-
Page not being ranked properly
Hi, Wondering if someone could possibly shed some light on why some of our pages are not being ranked properly on Google. For example this page https://www.mypetzilla.co.uk/dog-breeds Keyword "Dog Breeds" we can't be found on and we are absolutely baffled why? Could it be that we are listing all 100 and something dog breeds on one page? Should we introduce pagination or load more as user scrolls down. This page has been up for at least 4 years. Any suggestion or advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mypetzilla0 -
Bad Backlink?
Hi I found this site whilst looking through WMT backlinks to our site: http://www.buildingarena.co.uk/companies/key-industrial-equipment Is this type of iFrame of our site a bad signal to Google? It's not something we've done, so I'd like to know before getting it removed. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Removing Bad Links
Hi all, I am in the process of conducting a Link Audit and I am faced with quite a lot of seemingly poor quality examples, such as; http://gotogetaways.com/tag/cunard/ http://jobhiringlocalandabroad.blogspot.com/p/job-hiring-for-cruise-liner-orchestra.html http://lumukixu.xlx.pl/p-o-cruises-aurora.php To me these should be removed \ disavowed but I am getting a little resistence from stakeholders regarding the amount of links I am seeking to rid ourselves of - all are of a similar quality to my examples above... Just so that I know that I am not being 'over eager' with my audit, I welcome your opinions Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Organic keywords have dropped significantly in a short time period when relaunching site, but all 301 redirects are working properly.
We redesigned a site and relaunched it on the same domain. All 301 redirects were completed and are working properly. Around the same time, they fired an seo company who was published inbound links to their site on spammy directories (and this was during the same time period that Google's Hummingbird algorithm change took place). After the website relaunch, their keyword rankings fell off dramatically; and in all of our research, we're not seeing what has caused this issue. I'm not seeing any red flags in their moz reports or even in their google analytics traffic; but organic keywords are way down, and now leads from organic traffic are also way down. Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Are sites that recently lost traffic considered bad neighborhood?
Hi, While searching for co-operations and guest blogging opportunities I found several sites that look legit and that lost all SE traffic (according to various tools such as SEMRush). By legit I mean sites that have PR3 and up. Have many solid looking articles and that the articles are on the site's subject and that the articles do not necessarily point to other sites with exact match anchors. Should I post in these sites or are they probably penalized and therefore being there put me at risk? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
What is wrong with my site?
I could use suggestions/input. My site is consistently being beaten by doorway pages with zero to no content. In fact, on the keyword "lawrenceville plumber" I am being beaten by a KID with a blank wordpress installation. I really need help determining what my issues are and what I can do to help. According to all of the graders, ranks, etc my site is great. I have written tons of unique content, have added a blog unique articles and self-helps. Please help! My site is www.akinsplumbing.net. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Site dancing
Hi guys I have a site which is dancing. I mean one day is on position 20 , if I put more backlinks is falling, after rising again,, I dont know what is going on. The site is 2 years old, pr 2, authority 35. Why this is happening? Usually when he appears again is ranking higher, but today he disappear totally from rankings. Maybe return tomorrow? But anyway why is dancing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0