Duplicate content
-
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed?
Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
-
Hi James
If you have reason to believe that your website has received a penalty from Google, then I'd suggest submitting a Reconsideration Request once you're sure that your website no longer violates any of Google's guidelines, such as excessive duplicate content in your case, going by what you've described. It sounds as though your traffic levels have dropped as a result of significant drops in ranking.
There are two main types of penalty; 'Algorithmic Penalties' and 'Manual Penalties'.
If you received an Algorithmic Penalty (more common of the two) then your rankings will start to improve anyway, once some time has passed since you rectified your issue with duplicate content and have added value to your website.
If you received a Manual Penalty (less likely for duplicate content issues though certainly still possible) then a Reconsideration Request would be worth a try.
So once all is great & healthy again with your website (which it could be already) then decide whether or not to submit a reconsideration request based on how much time has passed since you believe you received a penalty and rectified the suspected issue. If you feel enough time has passed and your rankings haven't started to improve, then go for it.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
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
-
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Semi-duplicate content yet authoritative site
So I have 5 real estate sites. One of those sites is of course the original, and it has more/better content on most of the pages than the other sites. I used to be top ranked for all of the subdivsion names in my town. Then when I did the next 2-4 sites, I had some sites doing better than others for certain keywords, and then I have 3 of those sites that are basically the same URL structures (besides the actual domain) and they aren't getting fed very many visits. I have a couple of agents that work with me that I loaned my sites to to see if that would help since it would be a different name. My same youtube video is on each of the respective subdivision pages of my site and theirs. Also, their content is just rewritten content from mine about the same length of content. I have looked over and seen a few of my competitors who only have one site and their URL structures arent good at all, and their content isn't good at all and a good bit of their pages rank higher than my main site which is very frustrating to say the least since they are actually copy cats to my site. I sort of started the precedent of content, mapping the neighborhood, how far that subdivision is from certain landmarks, and then shot a video of each. They have pretty much done the same thing and are now ahead of me. What sort of advice could you give me? Right now, I have two sites that are almost duplicate in terms of a template and same subdivsions although I did change the content the best I could, and that site is still getting pretty good visits. I originally did it to try and dominate the first page of the SERPS and then Penguin and Panda came out and seemed to figure that game out. So now, I would still like to keep all the sites, but I'm assuming that would entail making them all unique, which seems to be tough seeing as though my town has the same subdivisions. Curious as to what the suggestions would be, as I have put a lot of time into these sites. If I post my site will it show up in the SERPS? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Veebs0 -
Questions about duplicate photo content?
I know that Google is a mystery, so I am not sure if there are answers to these questions, but I'm going to ask anyway! I recently realized that Google is not happy with duplicate photo content. I'm a photographer and have sold many photos in the past (but retained the rights for) that I am now using on my site. My recent revelations means that I'm now taking down all of these photos. So I've been reverse image searching all of my photos to see if I let anyone else use it first, and in the course of this I found out that there are many of my photos being used by other sites on the web. So my questions are: With photos that I used first and others have stolen, If I edit these photos (to add copyright info) and then re-upload them, will the sites that are using these images then get credit for using the original image first? If I have a photo on another one of my own sites and I take it down, can I safely use that photo on my main site, or will Google retain the knowledge that it's been used somewhere else first? If I sold a photo and it's being used on another site, can I safely use a different photo from the same series that is almost exactly the same? I am unclear what data from the photo Google is matching, and if they can tell the difference between photos that were taken a few seconds apart.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lina5000 -
How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0