Percentage of duplicate content allowable
-
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google?
For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse?
If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content?
thanks!
-
I dont believe you have aproblem if you havea bit of duplicate content, google does not penilize you for duplicate content, it just dosent award you points for it.
-
That sounds like something Google will hate by default. Your problem there is page quantity to quality and uniqueness ratio.
-
It's quite difficult to provide the exact data as Google algorithm is Google's hidden treasure. Better to keep yourself safe by creating completely unique content, Referring to your example of Wikipedia definition, you can add something like " ACCORDING TO WIKIPEDIA ..... " while copying definition or adding reference links while copying any content from other sources.
Remember that Google is not only giving importance to unique content but it should be of high quality. That means the article should be innovative like a complete new thing & well researched, so it mustn't be of 200 or less words. So Google will compare the quality of the whole article with the copied content & then it'll decide whether it's a duplicate content article or not.
-
We recently launched a large 3500 page website that auto generates a sentence after we plug in statistical data in our database.
So the only unique content is a single sentence?
Within that sentence many of the words would need to be common as well. Consider a simple site that offered the population for any given location. "The population of [California] is [13 million] people."
In the above example only 3 words are unique. Maybe your pages are a bit more elaborate but it seems to me those pages are simply not indexable. What you can do is index the main page where users can enter the location they wish to learn about, but not each possible result (i.e. California).
Either add significantly more content, or only index the main page.
-
We recently launched a large 3500 page website that auto generates a sentence after we plug in statistical data in our database. All pages are relevant to users and provide more value than other results in serps, but i think a penalty is in place that the farmer update may have detected with a sort of auto-penalty against us.
I sent in a reconsideration request last week, the whole project is on hold until we get a response. I'm expecting a generic answer from them.
We are debating on either writing more unique content for every page or entering in more statistical data to run some cool correlations. The statistical data would be 3x more beneficial to the user I feel, but unique content is what Google seeks and a safer bet just to get us indexed properly.
-
We're currently observing a crumbling empire of websites with auto-generated content. Google is somehow able to understand how substantial your content is and devalue the page and even the whole site if it does not meet their criteria. This is especially damaging for sites who have say 10% of great unique content and 90% of their pages are generated via tagging, browsable search and variable driven paragraphs of text.
Having citations is perfectly normal but I would include reference section just in case.
-
You can have some duplicate content in the manner you mentioned above. It is a natural and expected part of the internet that existing sources of information will be utilized.
There is not any magic number which says "30% duplication is ok, but 31% is not". Google's algorithms are private and constantly changing. Use good sense to guide you as to whether your page is unique and offers value to users.
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
-
Potential duplicate content issue?
We have a category on our website for PVC rolls to buy as standard 50m rolls (this includes 15 products in the category). We're also releasing PVC rolls to buy per metre (10m roll/25m roll etc...), again with 15 products, which we are adding as a separate category as it makes more sense for our customers and removes the risk of having too many options. Would using the same description be bad practice for SEO? The product is exactly the same just available in different roll sizes, but we definitely do not want to combine categories as it doesn't work for our customers. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RayflexGroup0 -
Duplicated content by the product pages
Hi,Do you thing those pages have duplicate content:https://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards-401.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-401.html.And also how much impact will it have on a panda update?I'm trying to figure out if all the product pages, (that are in the same way as the ones above) are the reson for a Panda Penalty
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Mass Duplicate Content
Hi guys Now that the full crawl is complete I've found the following: http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-onslow-02022 http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-moora-01816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=1816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=2022 The first 2 duplicate content is easily fixed by writing better product descriptions for each product (a lot of hours needed) but still an easy fix. The last 2 are review pages for each product which are all the same except for the main h1 text. My thinking is to add no index and no follow to all of these review pages? The site will be changing to magento very soon and theres still a lot of work to do. If anyone has any other suggestions or can spot any other issues, its appreciated. Kind regards Robert
On-Page Optimization | | yournetbiz1 -
Duplicate content issue
Hello, I got duplicate content issue on my home page : examplesite.com
On-Page Optimization | | digitalkiddie
examplesite.com/index.html Those page urls are with duplicate content. If in index.html i use 301 redirect like that : Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://examplesite.com" );
?> would i loose any page authority ? sorry for the newbie question0 -
Templated content with minor changes
Hello, I am working on a site with 1000s of inventory pages. i am slowly building links and writing custom content for pages that will bring best ROI. Will i have issues on templated pages with minor changes.currently traffic is pretty good. thank you
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I have over 200 duplicate page titles on a site that I am working on. Does putting a date at the end of some of them make it a unique enough title?
On-Page Optimization | | SavingSense0 -
How to avoid content duplication of my websites
Hello, We are having 4 domains abc.com, abc.in, abc.co.uk, abc.com.au with same content and same inner pages (abc.com/page1, abc.in/page1 etc.) targeting on different geographical areas. How can we avoid duplicate content issue in the home page as well as in the inner pages. Abc.com is the major site. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | semvibe0 -
Tools for finding duplicate content offsite?
Hi is there a tool that will spider my site then find similar text on external sites?
On-Page Optimization | | adamzski0