If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
-
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
-
You bet Mitch! Glad to help and let me know if there's anything else I can help answer. Hopefully maybe you'll get a few other opinions as well. As I'm sure you know, that's often valuable in search with so many nuances to the SEO game.
Good luck with your search efforts!
-
Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.
-
Really helpful thoughts all around. Sounds like we might continue to no-index the content for now (we assume that the descriptions of the programs are duplicate, since there's no way for us to efficiently check if people uploading program listings are just copy-pasting from their website -- reviews usually are the unique piece of content that allows us to move a page from noindexed to indexed).
Also, thanks for bringing the leave-a-review URLs to our attention -- I'll bring it up with my team this week!
Thanks again, Todd!
-
Did that help, Mitch?
-
Hey Mitch,
Thanks for the clarification--I think I understand your situation a little better now. Let me ask you this, are the pages your reviews sit on significantly different than the pages with the same reviews that your competitors have? Meaning, is the only cross-over the review portion of the content?
To answer your adjusted question, I would personally say no--review content is not different than any other type of content that could be construed as duplicate. I am wondering if you could solve your issue by differentiating the pages you have with reviews that match your competitors by adding other types of content to them. This might help add valuable context for a search engine as well as differentiate the page enough to help an engine sort out that they are different even though there is some content overlap. Just a thought.
My other thought on this is that maybe it's worth setting up a test? This is certainly a gray area and there are probably people who would have differing opinions from mine, so perhaps a good next step is planning and working on a test to see what happens with a small portion of pages?
If the content isn't thin, it sounds like you shouldn't have an issue with an algo like panda, so I don't see a huge risk in the test from what I understand of your situation.
If I've got your site right, I'm guessing you're asking about pages like this: http://www.gooverseas.com/study-abroad/austria/ies-abroad/47342 and whether or not you'd allow them to be indexed because the reviews at the bottom might be on other review sites. Again, if the content on the rest of the page is significant and not the same as what's on other similar pages, I wouldn't worry to much about it. If it is, I'd run a test and see what you can do.
Without doing more research, that's the best I can offer at this point!
Oh, and you might want to look into this (2 of many)...
That does look like something that would get you hit by panda.
Hope that helps and sorry if I'm still not understanding the question correctly.
-
Understood -- however, 1. It provides value and matches common user queries (i.e. "University of Michigan study abroad program reviews -- just made that exact query up though) 2. It's not lean content; we only think about indexing these pages when there are enough in-depth reviews (i.e paragraphs not a line or two). 3. I totally understand that that's usually the problem with duplicate content, but our competitors are ranking for these because we're being cautious of potential future algo updates and they're not -- so regardless of the fact that we're putting the content up first, they're getting the points.
My question is more along the lines of: is review content / user generated content treated differently than you traditional duplicate blog post? Is it OK if we index this page with reviews even though our competitor has already done so?
-
Personally, if they don't provide value for someone searching, I'd leave them noindexed. No reason to run the risk of an algo adjustment because of thin content. Duplicate content is mostly an issue because it makes it hard for search engines to determine which version to rank.
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
-
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
New Site Launch- Bad Rankings
So I am slightly stumped. I work on a few eCom sites and over the past few months we have been launching new products as well as some site updates/upgrades. The issue that I am having is this. Product that is actually new this season, as in we did not carry it before, is ranking fine...generally speaking we are top 3 in Google with Brand/Product name. However product that is not new, meaning it has a new color or graphic but has been in the catalog for years is not ranking. In Prior years the URL's ended with the product name, now however they have additional information added to the end for this season. Would not directing the old URL to the new URL effect the rankings of these pages? I am open to suggestions beyond redirecting as well. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K2_Sports0 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Not ranking well after site was hacked
My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings. I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes. But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google. And I see that they are cached. Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September. Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well. The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher. I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking? Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris-at-Magoosh0