Duplicate Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, is it a problem?
-
Hi,
If i use same terms of use and privacy policy content across my websites, does it amounts to duplicate content issues? Does it affect my websites in any manner?
Regards
-
Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors. If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal.
This is true for most SEO factors. If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.
-
You can do almost anything you wish on a "noindex" tagged page. You are telling the search engine bot to exclude the page from the search index, so the page should not affect your ranking.
The reason your site's # of pages is a factor, is your overall site is viewed as a whole. If you have a basic site with 10 pages, and there is a problem with 1 of the pages having duplicate content, then 10% of your site is affected, and this can impact how the search engine views your site. If your site hosted a forums with 10k pages, then that 1 page would represent 0.001 of your site, so the impact would not have any real effect.
-
Thanks for the helpful reply Alan! Can you please explain this - "If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact". How duplicate content issues vary between small and big sites? I was under the impression that number of pages do not have any influence in duplicate content.
Is it okay to use the same privacy policy and terms of use across different websites as long as i noindex,follow them?
-
How big is your site? If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact. But in reality, I expect your site is not primarily made up of keyword phrases that either of those pages would be optimized for, and that you have more than a few pages. If so, any "negative" aspect would not be severe.
Having said that, it really is best to just use a robots meta tag set to noindex,follow (my preference instead of blocking completely in the robots.txt file.
-
Thanks for the reply Ryan! But if i don't block it via robots.txt file or noindex tag, will it affect my site negatively? I mean the overall site
-
I would recommend blocking pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, legal, etc. It is unlikely these pages would ever bring traffic to your site. Even if they did, it is not going to be the quality traffic you desire.
In robots.txt you can add
Disallow: /pages/privacy/
substitute your local path for /pages/privacy/
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
-
Are FAQ's Pages Still Useful?
I know there has been a lot of discussion lately about FAQs pages and I'm wondering when and if they are still warranted useful and what if they have positive or negative effects on page rankings. Regards, John Brown
Content Development | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer0 -
Duplicate Forum Content
HI everyone, great to be here, absolutely loving everything, please go easy on me I'm quite a noob when it comes to seo, but hopefully my question isn't too basic. After running the initial checks on my websites, I found there are 7,646 duplicate pages? Some are easy fixes but the majority are not, being forum pages, the edit, quote and new post links are coming up as duplicates of the main post? Does anyone know how to fix this? Best Lee
Content Development | | LeeC0 -
Duplicate Ttile and Duplicate Content
I'm a beginner of SEO. I have a few questions need to ask people to help. The MozPro's Crawl Diagnostics show I have a lot of duplicate titles and duplicate content. However, most duplicate titles are related to Pagination. What should I do? Also, for my duplicate content. B/c we are selling similar products,everything all most the same, only product's item number different. How can I avoid it?
Content Development | | alexsu09100 -
Duplicate YouTube Script Content - Penalty?
I've been tasked with writing scripts for upward of 100 YouTube videos describing my company's products. In more than a few cases, the products are so similar as to be almost identical; unfortunately, they aren't and will require their own videos. If I create a "template" script, I would save hours and hours of tedium. For example: Video 1: (VOICEOVER) Buy the ABC widget today! Video 2: (VOICEOVER) Buy the XYZ widget today! So, my question is: Would I be looking at a duplicate content issue? Jeff McRichie's terrific Whiteboard Friday about YouTube Ranking Factors mentioned that YouTube has an auto-transcription feature that might expose my self-plagiarism, and I don't want to get dinged. BTW, this isn't a matter of my being too lazy to write individualized content; it's more that 1) the products are almost identical, and 2) I have just about a week to write, produce, and act(!) in all of them.
Content Development | | RScime250 -
Duplicate Pages Different Content
Will duplicate pages different content hurt rankings/seo E-commerce Site is plugin style with WYSIWYG editor allowing for full customization, all pages are setup with basic default content. Ive created custom pages with content/keywords to begin seo on them I have two pages www.domain.com/sports/hockey and www.domain.com/nhl-tickets The first url is default, with a single H1tag, + Default Meta+Title tags, the second is the content rich page, and structured properly, both of which show up on the site, should I block the first url from displaying at all? The reason I am asking is because ive also setup breadcrumb links, which makes all of these category url's accessible on the site, I cannot edit breadcrumb links, we can either have them there or remove them. Thank you Very Much!!
Content Development | | TP_Marketing0 -
Can you use creative commons non-commercial images on a company blog?
Does anyone know if it is okay to use creative commons images on your company blog if they are under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license. Technically you are using it on a commercial site, but you are not directly making money from the image or selling it.
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
Duplicate content on forums?
I am creating a forum. I am concerned that when I create the forum, users will copy content from other places to post onto my forum. How negative/bad is this in terms of google eyes? I am concerned when people copy press releases and re-post it to the forum. Should I make a rule that all content must be typed and not copied? Or is a little copying okay?
Content Development | | sseibel0 -
What plugins & tactics are you using for Wordpress meta SEO?
Currently I use All-In-One SEO and I quite like how simple it is to setup and it's stable. Is that still one of the best ones? What are you using these days? Is it worth stripping out the superfluous meta tags that Wordpress now puts in? Is there any value to adding meta descriptions to all my Tag pages and if so, is there a good plugin that will auto magically create unique descriptions for these pages? Same goes for my paginated archives. Thanks!
Content Development | | flowsimple0