Is a "Critical Acclaim" considered duplicate content on an eCommerce site?
-
I have noticed a lot of wine sites use "Critical Acclaims" on their product pages. These short descriptions made by industry experts are found on thousands of other sites. One example can be found on a Wine.com product page. Wine.com also provides USG through customer reviews on the page for original content.
Are the "Critical Acclaim" descriptions considered duplicate content? Is there a way to use this content and it not be considered duplicate (i.e. link to the source)?
-
I think you have to be a little careful here, and not just from an SEO standpoint. Now, you're talking about potentially taking someone else's content from behind their paywall and posting it publicly. I don't know the context or the industry very well, but you may be encroaching on a legal gray-area.
-
I think it's all a matter of degree, which is why these questions are tricky. Generally, I agree with @Crimson - it's like a testimonial. If you use them sparingly to supplement your own, unique content, they're fine. If you build a site out of a line of text and 20 "Acclaims" that are plastered across 500 other website, then you're site is going to look thin. It won't rank for much, and it could even be filtered out or penalized.
So, are they bad? Not necessarily - they can even be good. They should only be a piece of the puzzle, though. Any content re-use should be done sparingly, to enrich your site experience.
-
I totally agree that option 1 is best but the site is based on being a resource for these reviews because you can't get access to the reviews directly from the review site unless you pay for a subscription, which brings me to my next question. I can link directly to the page where the quote was taken but the quote is not shown on that page because you need to be a registered user on that site to get access to the reviews. Is it best to link to that page anyway or link to the site homepage where the review was originated? Also, should I be using a NoFollow link?
-
Well in that case you have 2 options really:
-
Rewrite and incorporate critical acclaims into your content in a way that is unique and useful to your visitors rather than just regurgitating acclaims word for word.
-
Link to the critical acclaim. If you are using this method then be sure to link to the original site that created the critical acclaim rather than just a third party site who is quoting the original acclaim.
Option 1 would be better as it is generally best practice to create content that is unique and valuable. Google and Matt Cutts always recommends going down this route.
-
-
I have seen SEOmoz (Rand) say these descriptions/acclaims are considered duplicate because they are found on potentially thousands of pages online. I am really asking whether or not you can use them in a way that is not considered duplicate like linking to the source of the content?
Rewriting them is always an option too, I guess.
-
These types of critical acclaim or testimonials are not really considered duplicate content. It is no different from quoting from a book. Google is clever enough to know that this is not duplicate content and if you are still considered about possible duplicate content issues then you could slightly rewrite or shorten testimonials to make them more unique e.g.
"Great wine.......thumbs up from me!"
original testimonial would read "Great wine, really fruity flavour and subtle notes, thumbs up from me!"
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
-
Duplicating content from manufacturer for client site and using canonical reference.
We manage content for many clients in the same industry, and many of them wish to keep their customers on their individualized websites (understandably). In order to do this, we have duplicated content in part from the manufacturers' pages for several "models" on the client's sites. We have put in a Canonical reference at the start of the content directing back to the manufacturer's page where we duplicated some of the content. We have only done a handful of pages while we figure out the canonical reference potential issue. So, my questions are: Is this necessary? Does this hurt, help or not do anything SEO-wise for our ranking of the site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moz1admin1 -
Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?
Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site? Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011. If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301? Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site? What would you do in my position?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozUser14692350692210 -
Pages are being dropped from index after a few days - AngularJS site serving "_escaped_fragment_"
My URL is: https://plentific.com/ Hi guys, About us: We are running an AngularJS SPA for property search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emre.kazan
Being an SPA and an entirely JavaScript application has proven to be an SEO nightmare, as you can imagine.
We are currently implementing the approach and serving an "escaped_fragment" version using PhantomJS.
Unfortunately, pre-rendering of the pages takes some time and even worse, on separate occasions the pre-rendering fails and the page appears to be empty. The problem: When I manually submit pages to Google, using the Fetch as Google tool, they get indexed and actually rank quite well for a few days and after that they just get dropped from the index.
Not getting lower in the rankings but totally dropped.
Even the Google cache returns a 404. The question: 1.) Could this be because of the whole serving an "escaped_fragment" version to the bots? (have in mind it is identical to the user visible one)? or 2.) Could this be because we are using an API to get our results leads to be considered "duplicate content" and that's why? And shouldn't this just result in lowering the SERP position instead of a drop? and 3.) Could this be a technical problem with us serving the content, or just Google does not trust sites served this way? Thank you very much! Pavel Velinov
SEO at Plentific.com1 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
What constitutes duplicate content?
I have a website that lists various events. There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012. It will probably happen again sometime in the future too. Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details. In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag. I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content. I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work. Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0 -
Load balancing - duplicate content?
Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site. My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be. The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems. Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0