Purchasing duplicate content
-
Morning all,
I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well.
I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain.
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
-
Thanks for the great response, some really useful thoughts.
To address your final point, the site is considerably stronger than the content creator's so it's reassuring to hear that this could be the case. Of course we'll be recommending that as much of the data as possible is curated and that the pages are improved with original content/
-
Wow, this is a loaded question. The way I see it we can break this up into two parts.
First, subdomains vs. domains vs. subpages. There has been a lot of discussion surrounding which structure should be used for SEO friendliness and to keep it really simple, if you're concerned about SEO then using a subpage structure is going to be the most beneficial. If you create a separate domain, that will be duplicate content and it does impact rankings. Subdomains are a little more complex, and I don't recommend them for SEO. In some cases, Google views subdomains as spam (think of all the PBNs created with blogspot.com) and in other cases it's viewed as a separate website. By structuring something as a subdomain you're indicating that the content is different enough from the main content of the root domain that you don't feel it should be included together. An example of this being used in the wild appropriately might be different language versions of a website, which especially makes sense in countries where the TLD doesn't represent multiple languages (like Switzerland - they have four national languages).
Next, the concept of duplicate content is different depending on whether it's duplicate internally, or duplicate externally. It's common for websites to have a certain amount of duplicate or common content within their own website. The number that has been repeated for years as a "safe" threshold is 30%, which is a stat that Matt Cutts threw out there before he retired. I use siteliner.com to discover how much common content has been replicated internally. Externally, if you have the same content as another website, this can pretty dramatically impact your rankings. Google does a decent job of assigning content to the correct website (who had it first, etc.) but they have a long way to go.
If you could assimilate the new content and have the pages redirected on a 1:1 basis to the new location then it's probably safe enough to do, and hopefully you will have it structured in a way that makes it useful to users. If you can't perform the redirect, I think you're more likely to struggle with achieving SEO goals for those new pages. In that case, take the time to set realistic expectations and track something like user engagement between new and old content so you have a realistic understanding of your success and challenges.
-
I would be thinking about these topics....
** How many other companies are purchasing or have purchased this data? Is it out there on lots of sites and the number is growing?
** Since this is a low-ranking competitor, how much additional money would be required to simply buy the entire company (provided that the data is not already out there on a ton of other websites.)
** Rather than purchasing this content, what would be the cost of original authorship for just those words that produce a big bulk of the traffic. Certainly 10% of the content produces over 50% of the traffic on most reference sites.
** With knowledge that in most duplicate content situations, a significantly stronger site will crush the same content on the original publisher.... where do I sit in this comparison of power?
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
-
Despite canonical duplicate content in WMT
Hi, 2 weeks ago we've made big changes in title and meta descriptions. To solve the missing title and descriptions. Also set the right canonical. Now i see that in WMT despite the canonical it shows duplicates in meta descriptions and titles. i've setup the canonical like this:
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
1. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname
2. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname-more-info The canonical on both pages is like this: I'm aware of creating duplicate titles and descriptions, caused by the cms we use and also caused by wrong structure of category/products (we'll solve that nest year) that's why i wanted the canonical, but now it's not going any better, did i do something wrong with the canonical?0 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
What could be the cause of this duplicate content error?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this? IUJvfZE.png
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson1 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
Product Duplicate Content Issue with Google Shopping
I have a site with approx 20,000 products. These products are resold to hundreds of other companies and are fed from one database therefore the content is duplicated many many times. To overcome this, we are launching the site with noindex meta tags on all product pages. (In phase 2 we will begin adding unique content for every product eek) However, we still want them to appear in Google Shopping. Will this happen or will it have to wait until we remove the noindex tags?
Technical SEO | | FGroup0 -
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 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0