Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
-
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice?
Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)?
Thanks
-
I usually instruct affiliate managers to write their own company bio and/or product descriptions for affiliates to use. Treat every single piece of content on your site as if it were an asset, because it is.
You can have 2,000 affiliates linking to you (though their links should probably be nofollowed) from within the same company bio or product description as long as that is not ALSO the same company bio or product description you use on your site. If they all want to share content that's their problem. Just don't let them share YOUR content.
-
Well a trackback is to avoid duplicate content penalties for an external site with the same content.
A canonical is internal to your site. So if you want to have two pages with the same url and avoid duplication and still pass link juice you would use a rel=canonical tag.
This should clear it up for you as it did for me : )
-
So it's for the affiliate to implement the canonical as we're the originating source?
-
Definitely** do something, you do not want duplicate content.** You can always trackback to the original content or use a rel=canonical tag.
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
-
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Best way to go about merging 2 sites with significant search volume?
Hi everyone! A client of ours ('Company A') recently acquired another company ('Company B') - both brands carry weight within their industry. Company A's brand name currently registers over 6,500 searches per month, while Company B's brand name draws about 2,500 searches per month. While Company B is smaller, their search volume isn't insignificant. The powers that be plan to discontinue Company B's site at an unspecified date in the future, but it's on the backburner. We'd obviously like to transfer as much of their current ranking as possible, but we also don't want to confuse users. There's additional search volume for term variations such as 'Company B jobs' & 'Company B locations' that we'd like to capture for as long as there's still volume there. Would a microsite with Company B's look & feel (to make it easier to house pages built to capture careers/locations searches) justify its inherent cost, or would it be just as valuable to build a series of landing pages on Company A's site? (Obviously assuming that valid redirects would be in place once Company B's site is taken down.) Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wilcoxcm0 -
How Best To Accommodate A Site's Changing Subject Matter?
Hi, I'm dealing with a several year old site that has had a lot of success in organic search around one particular subject and is now evolving into other subjects. Would like your experience on how best to handle this. Here's what we have so far: First, the site was about niche craft carpentry. Then, it added training. Then, it added training in other subjects in smatterings, like plumbing, electrical, etc. Now it's considering adding training in subjects even further from niche craft carpentry. So, interior decorator training, landscaping training, etc. Nearly all of it's organic search traffic (about 200,00 per month) comes from blogs, articles and discussions related to the original topic of niche craft carpentry... not training. As we've branched out from carpentry into carpentry training and then other subject training, have not had great success in organic with these new less related topics. We've had some for carpentry training type terms, but not much else. If the site owners are hell bent on expanding into these other training subjects for business reasons other than search, how would you structure it? For instance, would you go originalsitename.com/landscaping or landscaping.OriginalSiteName.com or what? I understand that a landscaping.originalsitename.com is for all intents and purposes a new domain name and won't have the authority of the original. However, would it have more chance of breaking free of how Google has pigeon-holed the original site's subject matter as niche carpentry-relevant only? Or, would you just keep adding subjects to the original domain name and figure that one of these days google is going to see it as the Lynda.com of an expanding galaxy of home improvement? I should add that the future of the site is training, so landscape training or interior design training is pretty far from high end niche carpentry stuff. What do you think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Best way for Google and Bing not to crawl my /en default english pages
Hi Guys, I just transferred my old site to a new one and now have sub folder TLD's. My default pages from the front end and sitemap don't show /en after www.mysite.com. The only translation i have is in spanish where Google will crawl www.mysite.com/es (spanish). 1. On the SERPS of Google and Bing, every url that is crawled, shows the extra "/en" in my TLD. I find that very weird considering there is no physical /en in my urls. When i select the link it automatically redirects to it's default and natural page (no /en). All canonical tags do not show /en either, ONLY the SERPS. Should robots.txt be updated to "disallow /en"? 2. While i did a site transfer, we have altered some of the category url's in our domain. So we've had a lot of 301 redirects, but while searching specific keywords in the SERPS, the #1 ranked url shows up as our old url that redirects to a 404 page, and our newly created url shows up as #2 that goes to the correct page. Is there anyway to tell Google to stop showing our old url's in the SERP's? And would the "Fetch as Google" option in GWT be a great option to upload all of my url's so Google bots can crawl the right pages only? Direct Message me if you want real examples. THank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
What is Best Way to Scale RCS Content?
SEO has really moved away from the nitty gritty analysis of backlinking factors, link wheels, and the like and has shifted to a more holistic marketing approach. That approach is best described around MOZ as “Real Company S#it”. RCS is a great way to think about what we really do because it is so much more than just SEO or just Social Media. However, our clients and business owners do want to see results and want it quantified in some way. The way most of our clients understand SEO is by ranking high on specific terms or online avenues they have a better possibility of generating traffic/sales/revenue. They understand this more from the light of traditional marketing, where you pay for a TV ad and then measure to see how much revenue that ad generated. In the light of RCS and the need to target a large number of keywords for a given client, how do most PROs handle this situation; where you have a large number of keywords to target but with RCS? Many I’ve asked tend to use the traditional approach of creating a single content piece that is geared towards a given target keyword. However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target. In this case is not really a case of scaling down the client expectations? What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget? Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts? It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Two Sites Similar content?
I just started working at this company last month. We started to add new content to pages like http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. This is their main site. Then i realized it also put the new content on their sister site http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. the first site is the main site and I think will get credit for the unique new content. The second one I do not think will get credit and will more than likely be counted as duplicate content. We are changing this so it will no longer be the same. However, I am curious to see ways people think we could fix this issues? Also is it effecting both sits for just the second one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Domain w/ Identical Content to Site we are Optimizing
Hi Guys, We've been optimizing a client's site for about a year or so now and on a call the other day the client brought up that he owns and operates another site that's marketing the same product, but to a difference audience (we work on the direct to consumer side, this is a distributior focused site),with the same exact content as the site we are optimizing. Obviously this is a major duplcant content issue and we need to get it resolved very quickjly. We have already reccomendt to the client that we re-write content, but this is where my questions comes in - Which site should we rewrite the content on? The site we are optimizing is the more impoorant of the two, while we still want the other site to hold rankings we dont want to end up accidently optimizing the other site wherein the site we are working on full time suffers a lost when a "compeiting" site creates compeltely new content and may, accidentally, end up ranking higher than the site we are focusing on full time. As links also play a role, would that be a KPI to look at here in determining which site gets new content and which does not? In this scenairo, would would you guys recommend? Just want to make sure I'm dotting all my I's, and crossing T's here. Many thanks to all in advance, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Havas_Disco0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0