Duplicate content. Competing for rank.
-
Scenario:
An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy.
Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google?
Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content?
Thank you.
-
Q1: Easier said than done, but definitely worth the time to rewrite the "chunks," especially if they are descriptions. I can see if it's something like safety information, where you'd actually want it to be known it's coming from a trusted source. But, descriptions should be rewritable. If not, you probably don't want to pass the copy off as your own, so best to keep it separate and say something like "site XYZ has this to say..."
Also, if it can't be rewritten, gauge how much content is unique to each page, and consider what else can be written about the cars to help balance out the ratio of unique to copied content.
Q2: Make sure the dealer's website has self-referencing canonicals if that's the original source of the information.
-
Q2: If the "popular car listing website" has better domain authority, domain age etc. than the "dealer's website", then it could be an issue because Google sees the other website as more authoritative. However, date of publication is also important so if you posted it first on your website then there should be a less risk. Anyway, I'd recommend to change the text a bit for every website if possible. Or you can add some more multimedia content to the main page to make it different and more preferred.
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
-
International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?
Hi, A follow up question from another one I had a couple of months ago: It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors). Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
I believe it happens for two reasons: 1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place. 2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users. Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong? 2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder. Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one. I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what). That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way? Thank you so much!
G0 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Scraping / Duplicate Content Question
Hi All, I understanding the way to protect content such as a feature rich article is to create authorship by linking to your Google+ account. My Question
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
You have created a webpage that is informative but not worthy to be an article, hence no need create authorship in Google+
If a competitor comes along and steals this content word for word, something similar, creates their own Google+ page, can you be penalised? Is there any way to protect yourself without authorship and Google+? Regards Mark0 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0 -
Bi-Lingual Site: Lack of Translated Content & Duplicate Content
One of our clients has a blog with an English and Spanish version of every blog post. It's in WordPress and we're using the Q-Translate plugin. The problem is that my company is publishing blog posts in English only. The client is then responsible for having the piece translated, at which point we can add the translation to the blog. So the process is working like this: We add the post in English. We literally copy the exact same English content to the Spanish version, to serve as a placeholder until it's translated by the client. (*Question on this below) We give the Spanish page a placeholder title tag, so at least the title tags will not be duplicate in the mean time. We publish. Two pages go live with the exact same content and different title tags. A week or more later, we get the translated version of the post, and add that as the Spanish version, updating the content, links, and meta data. Our posts typically get indexed very quickly, so I'm worried that this is creating a duplicate content issue. What do you think? What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog. I'm looking for any suggestions and advice to make this process more successful for the client. *Would it be better to leave the Spanish page blank? Or add a sentence like: "This post is only available in English" with a link to the English version? Additionally, if you know of a relatively inexpensive but high-quality translation service that can turn these translations around quicker than my client can, I would love to hear about it. Thanks! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djreich0 -
Login Page = Duplicate content?
I am having a problem with duplicate content with my log in page QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearnTraining
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BAM-SP
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BRE-SP
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BTAF
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BTDF What is the best way to handle it? Add a couple sentences to each page to make it unique? Use a rel canonical, or a no index no follow or something completely different? Your help is greatly appreciated!0