Duplicate Content from Multiple Sources Cross-Domain

[SWKurt]

Hi Moz Community,

We have a client who is legitimately repurposing, or scraping, content from site A to site B. I looked into it and Google recommends the cross-domain rel=canonical tag below:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

The issue is it is not a one to one situation. In fact site B will have several pages of content from site A all on one URL. Below is an example of what they are trying to accomplish.

EX - www.siteB.com/apples-and-oranges is made up of content from www.siteA.com/apples & www.siteB.com/oranges

So with that said, are we still in fear of getting hit for duplicate content? Should we add multiple rel=canonical tags to reflect both pages? What should be our course of action.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Kurt,

Multiple canonicals won't work. I believe our own Dr. Pete did some testing on this a couple years ago, and the results didn't pan out.

It there isn't original content on the page, you have a couple of options. First of all you could de-index the page by adding a meta NOINDEX tag. A second option would be use the cross-domain canoncical to the most prominent choice (page A or page B) typically whatever is closer to the top of the page.

If you have the opportunity to add unique content to the page, this might solve your problem. A couple hundred words could make the content unique and the page might have a chance of ranking on it's own and you wouldn't need to worry about canonicalization.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[DennisSeymour]

I wouldnt worry about duplicate issues too much unless its on the same domain. It would be my last thing to worry about, probably after fixing the new site. I have done it before on some projects so i understand how annoying this is.

Im wondering why he would want to put the same piece of content on SiteB on 2 separate pieces though...

You would want to put rel=canonical on the pages that have the content like the siteB content page pointing to the siteB mixed content

It's a bit vague but I hope I understood your situation correctly.