How to publish duplicate content legitimately without Panda problems
-
Let's imagine that you own a successful website that publishes a lot of syndicated news articles and syndicated columnists.
Your visitors love these articles and columns but the search engines see them as duplicate content.
You worry about being viewed as a "content farm" because of this duplicate content and getting the Panda penalty.
So, you decide to continue publishing the content and use...
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
This allows you do display the content for your visitors but it should stop the search engines from indexing any pages with this code. It should also allow robots to spider the pages and pass link value through them.
I have two questions.....
-
If you use "noindex" will that be enough to prevent your site from being considered as a content farm?
-
Is there a better way to continue publication of syndicated content but protect the site from duplicate content problems?
-
-
Good idea about attributing with rel=canonical.
Thanks!
-
Noindexing the syndicated articles should, in theory, minimize the likelihood of having a Panda problem, but it seems like Panda is constantly evolving. You will probably see some kind of drop in rankings as the number of indexed pages of for site will decrease. If you have say, 1000 pages total on the site and suddenly 900 are taken out of the index, this might be a problem. If it is a much smaller percentage of the site, you might not have a problem at all. Other than the number of indexed pages, I don't think you will have a problem once the syndicated stuff is noindexed.
It will probably take Google a while to re-index/un-index the pages, so hopefully it won't be a fast drop if there is one. In the long run, it is probably better to at least have the appearance of trying to do the right thing. Linking to the source, and maybe using rel=canonical tags to the original article would also be a good practice. -
Thank you, Nick.
We will be using the "noindex" only on the pages with syndicated content. This is a DreamWeaver site and it is easy to place the code on specific pages and does not use excerpts.
Do you still see a potential problem?
The question really is... "Could a site that contains a lot of syndicated content have a Panda problem if the pages that contain that content are noindexed?"
-
I am assuming you intend to use no index only on the duplicate content articles. Using no index on everything would also prevent your content from being indexed and found through Google.
If you are using Wordpress or something else that will allow showing excerpts, you could try making the article pages noindex and show only excerpts on the main page and category pages which would be indexed and followed. I think that would make the articles not appear in searches and avoid duplicate content penalties, while allowing the pages that show the excerpts to still be indexed and rank OK.
The idea here is that the pages showing the excerpts would have enough text to help the home and category pages to rank for the subject matter and hopefully not be seen as what it is - copied content.
You will probably eventually get caught by the Panda, but this may work as a temporary solution until you can get some original content mixed in.
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
-
Duplicate Content/Similar Pages
Hello, I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Database driven content producing false duplicate content errors
How do I stop the Moz crawler from creating false duplicate content errors. I have yet to submit my website to google crawler because I am waiting to fix all my site optimization issues. Example: contactus.aspx?propid=200, contactus.aspx?propid=201.... these are the same pages but with some old url parameters stuck on them. How do I get Moz and Google not to consider these duplicates. I have looked at http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content with respect to Rel="canonical" and I think I am just confused. Nick
Technical SEO | | nickcargill0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello guys, After fixing the rel tag on similar pages on the site I thought that duplicate content issue were resolved. I checked HTML Improvements on GWT and instead of going down as I expected, it went up. The duplicate issues affect identical product pages which differ from each other just for one detail, let's say length or colour. I could write different meta tags as the duplicate is the meta description, and I did it for some products but still didn't have any effects and they are still showing as duplicates. What would the problem be? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Avoiding Cannibalism and Duplication with content
Hi, For the example I will use a computers e-commerce store... I'm working on creating guides for the store -
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
How to choose a laptop
How to choose a desktop I believe that each guide will be great on its own and that it answers a specific question (meaning that someone looking for a laptop will search specifically laptop info and the same goes for desktop). This is why I didn't creating a "How to choose a computer" guide. I also want each guide to have all information and not to start sending the user to secondary pages in order to fill in missing info. However, even though there are several details that are different between the laptops and desktops, like importance of weight, screen size etc., a lot of things the checklist (like deciding on how much memory is needed, graphic card, core etc.) are the same. Please advise on how to pursue it. Should I just write two guides and make sure that the same duplicated content ideas are simply written in a different way?0 -
Duplicate content
I'm getting an error showing that two separate pages have duplicate content. The pages are: | Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Registrar Register4Less, Inc. http://register4less.com/faq/cache/11.html 1 27 1 Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Register4Less Reseller (Tucows) http://register4less.com/faq/cache/7.html | These are both registration agreements, one for us (Register4Less, Inc.) as the registrar, and one for Tucows as the registrar. The pages are largely the same, but are in fact different. Is there a way to flag these pages as not being duplicate content? Thanks, Doug.
Technical SEO | | R4L0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0