Blogs created by a company for us and another company
-
Hi, we are not a big company and as well as creating our own blogs, a company for a while now has provided us each month with blog posts. But hey also provide other companies in the UK with the same content.
Each month we create 2 or 3 of our own generated blog posts relating to the services we provide.
Also we receive on average 10 blog posts (pulled in to the site through a word press add in and an rss feed from the company) to the site.
The content is about specific topics which people will be searching for and they are really well optimized pages.
Our own blog posts are looked at more often 80% to 20% but we do have a great link from a national site with a DA of 97 linking to one of their blog posts.
But I wondered if google penalizes us because there will be other companies across the UK with the exact same content as us? Or whether these blog posts will help us because it is great content, even though other companies will probably have the same posts on their site?
Nobody in our area uses this content as we have an agreement with the company which provides it.
Many Thanks
-
The others are right, you should be looking for another company to provide you with unique posts for both UX and search engine reasons.
I wouldn't expect that you'll find yourself with a penalty since it will look more like poorly managed syndication than anything else but at the same time, you're not going to get any value out of it.
The best ways to handle it would be to use one of the three methods (preferably rel=canonical) that tell search engines that your content came from one of the other sites it has been posted on but of course, doing this essentially says "this isn't my content, please give me no credit for it" which begs the question... why pay for it?
-
Jordan is right, most likely you will run into duplicate content issues if you allow duplicate content to be posted on your website. That duplicate content definitely hurts your site's search engine rankings. If you feel the content is good for your site's users, then you may want to keep it, but make sure that it's not being indexed by the search engines.
If you're paying someone to provide you content and that content isn't unique for your website, then I wouldn't see it as very valuable--at least for SEO purposes. I would re-consider whether or not you want that duplicate content on your website, let alone pay a premium for it.
-
You could very easily run into a duplicate content issue if you are using content that is identical to other websites on your own website. I would highly recommend reading Moz's duplicate content post. You are basically paying to have someone ruin your seo.
I would recommend finding another company that will provide you with unique content so you will not potentially incur any duplicate content issues.
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
-
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
Creating a .cn site with the existing site content
Hi all, I'm planning to create a .cn site. If I simply translate the existing content on my site (.com.au) into Chinese, do you think Google will see the .cn site as a duplicate of the main site? Will this cause any duplicate content issues? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | QuantumWeb620 -
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
Review rich snippet with reviews hosted on customer feedback company's website?
Is it possible to enable rich snippets for reviews that are not visible on the page in question? A restaurant's Wordpress website mentions the average rating but the actual customer feedback and reviews are displayed on a page on the website of the feedback company. Would it be enough to implement a small widget (displays star rating, number of reviews and links to the review page) and add microdata/J-SON to convince search engines that the reviews are legit? Thanks in advance! Bas
On-Page Optimization | | SEO-Bas0 -
Should we add our company's name in page title tag or not?
We have been adding our company (Townscript) name in all the page titles. For example, in an event page of Lucknow Conclave: www.townscript.com/lucknowconclave the page title is Lucknow Conclave | Alexis Society | Townscript I read somewhere that it's not necessary to put your company's name in the title tag. Is it right? Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | sanchitmalik0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Doubt about correct no. of categories on my blog
I have site wide 25 categories on my blog but I dont know whether I should keep few categories only like 6-8 or having 25 categories is ok? Plz help
On-Page Optimization | | ksbnok0 -
Creating Duplicate Content on Shopping Sites
I have a client with an eCommerce site that is interested in adding their products to shopping sites. If we use the same information that is on the site currently, will we run into duplicate content issues when those same products & descriptions are published on shopping sites? Is it best practice to rewrite the product title and descriptions for shopping sites to avoid duplicate content issues?
On-Page Optimization | | mj7750