Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
-
Hi,
We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc...
We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site.
My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok?
We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not.
So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics.
Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs?
Cheers
-
I think the only time you need to be worried about this is if you have the exact same content published on your own website/blog.
If you do, ensure you add a
rel="author"link (to either author page on site or Google+ profile) and that your webpage is indexed in the search engine before any other site publish identical or similar content. -
thanks for your responses. the press release hasn't been submitted to a pr website. i have emailed indivual sites/blogs and newspapers to see if they will publish the charity night we did.
so it is all real news of an event that actually happened.
cheers
-
Since you are actually distributing "Real News" and not just fluff news to target keywords for SEO - I would think "spinning" it would be worse....
But to be honest - It is a hard question to answer - as Technically a press release is not supposed to be posted on others sites word for word --- a press release is to bait journalists/bloggers to write about your story - Only once the days of easy manipulation was it turned into some other type of "link building" strategy.
I would suggest submitting the same one - But with sites like PRweb, it is hard these days to really justify it, as to be honest is it not just a big network to gain links?
IMHO of course
-
Not necessarily -
Alot of PRWebs high authority distribution network is Nofollow
Also just because it is picked up, does not mean it is not duplicate content - or will not be treated as dup content in the future
Over the past few years I have personally seen a massive depreciation of Online Press Release distribution "White Hat" SEO benefits.
I also am not sure I would agree post Panda/Penguin - that Press releases are a good way to pass "Link Juice"
I am not saying it is a lost cause, but just feel your assesment is a little circa 2009, 2010
-
I use PRWeb to distribute press releases, and while each press release gets picked up anywhere by 30 - 100 news outlets, I haven't yet noticed any issues with it being tagged as duplicated content.....it's more so a way to get link juice to your website. If multiple news sources publish the same press release it doesn't reflect negatively on your site metrics, it's a good thing.
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
-
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Country Code Top Level Domains & Duplicate Content
Hi looking to launch in a new market, currently we have a .com.au domain which is geo-targeted to Australia. We want to launch in New Zealand which is ends with .co.nz If i duplicate the Australian based site completely on the new .co.nz domain name, would i face duplicate content issues from a SEO standpoint?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Even though it's on a completely separate country code. Or is it still advised tosetup hreflang tag across both of the domains? Cheers.0 -
Duplicate content on sites from different countries
Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website. Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension. Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world? Any statement from Google about this? Regards, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
How do I geo-target continents & avoid duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a website which will have content tailored for a few locations: USA: www.site.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
Europe EN: www.site.com/eu
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr-ca Link hreflang and the GWT option are designed for countries. I expect a fair amount of duplicate content; the only differences will be in product selection and prices. What are my options to tell Google that it should serve www.site.com/eu in Europe instead of www.site.com? We are not targeting a particular country on that continent. Thanks!0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0
