Duplicate Content on Event Pages
-
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
-
A penalty is something google will have to manually remove and you will be able to see that in webmaster tools. A devaluation is when you are adjusted by the algorithm and lowered as a result because each thing that google does not like acts as points against you but you can quickly change and see your results return. Does that make sense?
-
We decided that it was worth a large investment as we would own the content ourselves and not worry in the future about anyone claiming ownership to the content as google gets stricter. So we re wrote half a million words!
-
Also could you fully explain the difference between devaluation and a penalty?
-
Do you mind if I ask how much of the content you re-wrote? My main fear is the amount of work that this would take since a lot of content goes up on the site daily. If the content is re-written did you do the same amount of content or did you re-write your office space listings with less content?
-
This is a Panda issue.
Google has said many times with affiliate sites that use the same content that if they do a better job than the original site it will rank them. So its not all bad when you look at it from that point of view.
However, Google loves unique content and will do its best to rank sites first that have the unique content. I have a business in the office space industry and a few years back we used to aggregate office apace listings which were shared amongst 30+ sites. The display of these listings would be different for many searches but the content was the same as all the other sites. This slowly put us in a PANDA DEVALUATION (there is no panda penalty).
After re-writing them with our clients we saw a significant change once the content had be re-crawled.
So it can have a great effect. If Google starts to see that large parts of your site are duplicate content it will start to question the authority you have in your industry.
Could you offer and incentive to your customers to write something unique? And also maybe inform your users not to copy and paste their own content on your site as this could affect them negatively in Google?
If you are an authority could you tell users that if you want to be listed it must be unique? Or if its a paid service have an ad on service for a few bucks where you write a professional description? Might become a nice additional income?
Just a few ideas
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
-
How to explain to a client that duplicate content is bad...
Afternoon! An SEO client of ours has copied a load of landing/category page content from other sites. Lots of emails have been sent back and forth asking them to remove it, but they are adamant to keep it up there until we have time to amend it. We have explained to them: The Google penalty risks The copyright risks The short and long-term implications for their brand new business/website The money they are spending on our SEO package could be completely wasted if they're caught I think the above is pretty black and white, but the director of this company will not budge. Does anyone have any different approaches? The director said he's happy for us to amend the content but, in the meantime, the plagiarised content will not be removed. Cheers, Lewis
On-Page Optimization | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Pages with near duplicate content
Hi Mozzers, I need your opinion on the following. Imagine that we have a product X (brand Sony for example), so if we sell parts for different models of items of this product X, we then have numerous product pages with model number. Sony camera parts for Sony Camera XYZ parts for Sony Camera XY etc. So the thing is that these pages are very very similar, like 90% duplicate and they do duplicate pages for Panasonic, Canon let's say with small tweaks in content. I know that those are duplicates and I would experiment removing a category for one brand only (least seached for), but at the same time I cannot remove for the rest as they convert a lot, being close to the search query of the customer (customer looks for parts for Sony XYZ, lands on the page and buys, insteading of staying on a page for Sony parts where should additionally browse for model number). What would you advise to make as unique as possible these pages, I am thinking about: change page titles. meta descriptions tweak the content as much as I can (very difficult, there is nothing fancy or different in those :(() i will start with top top pages that really drive traffic first and see how it goes. I will remove least visited pages and prominently put the model number in Sony parts page to see how it goes in terms of organic and most importantly conversions Any other ideas? I am really concerned about dupes and a penalty, but I try to think of solutions in order not to kill conversions at this point. Have a lovely Monday
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Is there a way to tell Google a site has duplicated content?
Hello, We are joining 4 of our sites, into 1 big portal, and the content from each site gonna be inside this portal and sold as a package. We don't wanna kill these sites we are joining at this moment, we just wanna import their content into the new site and in a few months we will be killing them. Is there a way to tell Google to not consider the content on these small sites, so the new site don't get penalised? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | darkmediagroup0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
Meta descriptions better empty or with duplicate content?
I am working with a yahoo store. Somehow all of the meta description fields were filled in with random content from throughout the store. For example, a black cabinet knob product page might have in its description field the specifications for a drawer slide. I don't know how this happened. We have had a programmer auto populate certain fields to get them ready for product feeds, etc. It's possible they screwed something up during that, this was a long time ago. My question. Regardless of how it happened. Is it better for me to have them wipe these fields entirely clean? Or, is it better for me to have them populate the fields with a duplicate of our text from the body. The site has about 6,500 pages so I have and will make custom descriptions for the more important pages after this process, but the workload to do them all is too much. So, nothing or duplicate content for the pages that likely won't receive personal attention?
On-Page Optimization | | dellcos1 -
2 Duplicate pages. One Showing "/"
In SEOMoz report I have 2 pages showing that are identical in name/URL apart from the fact that one ends with the / symbol and one doesnt'. They are both showing as having too many on-page links. But one shows 106 links and the other shows 106. In clients' admin section I can only find evidence of the page without the /. I wonder if anyone could advise how best to move forward? Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
How do you avoid duplicate content when you sell products that are produced by other manufacturers?
I have a packaging product site, and they sell products from various manufacturers. What can we do with the product detail pages? As of now, the client has copy pasted content straight from the "About" sections on the manufacturers' sites. Obviously, those manufacturers want my client to sell their products, and the products need to be described. How much of a no-no is this copy pasting, and how can I fix it?
On-Page Optimization | | lhc670 -
Duplicate Content - Site Wide or Internet Wide?
Hello... I am creating a new website and i was wondering how you guys would define duplicate content? If my new site had the same page titles and descriptions as my existing site, would that be duplicate content? Or does duplicate content mean same titles and descriptions in the same site? I'm wondering if i can upload the same database (with page titles and descriptions and alt tags) to my new site or if that would be looked at as duplicate... Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850