Will our two retail sites get hit with duplicate content?
-
Our retail site just rolled out a second online store. The URL is new and it is showing some of the same products from the same vendors (probably about 40% of the fist store is in the second store). Down the road, we will remove the products from the first site, however, we are keeping it for now. The products show up on both sites, with the same images, and the same descriptions and almost the same URL query string. Are we going to get hit with any penalties due to duplicate content?
-
Ive asked them to Canonicalize from the old site to the new site.... although... we have great rankings for some of the brands on the old site.
-
You are definitely at risk of it, yes. One of the main benefits of the duplicate content filters that google introduced was to stop people rolling out cookie-cutter sites of the same products in order to dominate the SERPs. Whilst that isn't your aim the result is quite similar and you could therefore get penalised.
My fear would be a penalty that goes beyond just affecting the duplicate parts. This might be a particular concern on a new site.
You might be able to lower the risk of this by altering the mix:
- Can you lose any of the duplicate products for now?
- Could you just no-index them on the new site for now?
- If you can add new descriptions can you add something unique to the existing ones?
- Is there other unique content that you could add
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
-
We want to move Content from one domain to another
We have a large amount of unique content on a domain we are no longer using/promoting. Its been sat there for a couple of years. Its literally wasted content on a non used or promoted domain. We want to move it to a busy site of ours. Are there any best practices or pitfalls we should be aware of?
Content Development | | Simonws0010 -
Duplicate Content Discovery
I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape. My question is should I be worried about the footer? Is 28% a lot?
Content Development | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate Content
I am wondering what is the best way to show google that there is duplicate content on the page. for example on our product pages they are unique content except we give the same guarantee and promise on every product providing some duplicate content. What is the best way to fix this issue?
Content Development | | DoRM0 -
Matt Cutts and Curated Content -- something is confusing here...
Okay, I read an interview somewhere this week where Matt Cutts said he didn't care much for curated content. Today I searched on that subject and came up with the following video of his: http://youtu.be/zZU7O1BHfyo So, in the video he is going along and saying not to just grab content and repost it. And then at around minute 3:15 he says that, on the other hand, you can have a blog like DaringFireball.net and that's a good thing, because the blogger takes the time to pick and choose what he is posting. I went to Daring Fireball to take a look, and I saw that he writes maybe one line of commentary, and then pastes in a big chunk of the curated content along with a link to the source. This shocked me. How could Matt like that blog -- he keeps telling that he likes original not duplicate, curated content. So, the difference is that a blog can get away with this if they exercise discretion in what they choose to copy and paste? How the hell would the Google algorithm know what the intention of the blogger is? And here I've been wasting my time writing up paragraphs and paragraphs to precede any excerpts I paste in, in fear of getting hit by Google. I'd like to hear your comments on this.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Duplicate content - 6 websites, 1 IP. Is the #1 site knocked down too?
Yes I know, running multiple websites on 1 IP isn't smart. 6 Websites with duplicate content on 1 IP is even worse. It's a technical issue we can't solve quickly. Thing is, our #1 website, which has the highest DA and PR, was the first website with all this content. All other websites we're running were launched a few months, and some a few years, later. All content was copied from the #1 website. I'd say the other websites would get knocked down by Google, because they duplicated the content. Google should see that our #1 website was the first that uploaded this content. Therefore our #1 website should rank normally. Questions is: What does Google think of duplicate content when all websites are on 1 IP? Is, or will our #1 website get punished as well?
Content Development | | Webprint0 -
Google still caching old site
Hi all, We just acquired a new domain that was being squatted on by a reseller for a very long time and on the 5th June migrated our site over to it, replacing their advertising holding page. The domain is http://primate.co.uk It's been a week now though and Google hasn't seemed to have updated it's cache. Doing a search for 'primate.co.uk' in Google lists the site but with the old holding page description. Web master tools doesn't report any errors or issues with the site. Does anyone know how we can get Google to index the domain and update it's cache? Cheers, Gordon
Content Development | | Primate0 -
Index pdf files but redirecto to site
Hi, One of our clients has tons of PDFs (manuals, etc.) and frequently gets good rankings for the direct PDF link. While we're happy about the PDFs attracting users' attention, we'd like to redirect them to the site where the original PDF link is published and avoid that people open the pdf directly. In short, we'd like to index the PDFs, but show to users the pdf link within a site - how should we proceed to do that? Thanks, GM
Content Development | | gmellak0