Duplicate content harms individual pages or whole site?
-
Hi,
One section of my site is a selection of Art and Design books. I have about 200 individual posts, each with a book image and a description retrieved from Amazon (using their API).
Due to several reasons not worth mentioning I decided to use the Amazon description. I don't mind if those pages rank well or not, but I need them as additional content for my visitors as they browse my site. The value relies in the selection of books.
My question is if the duplicate content taken from Amazon harms only each book page or the whole site.
The rest of the site has unique content.
Thanks!
Enrique
-
Thanks Egol! I guess I will do that.
Enrique
-
We had a site that republished government documents.
After the Panda update we decided that we wanted to keep some of those pages on the site for visitors but remove them from the search index. So we added this to the head....
name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
There were other pages that we decided to delete. So we removed those files from the server and added a 301 redirect to an .htaccess file in the folder where they were located.
-
Thanks!
That sounds bad indeed. I need those pages in my site, so should I block them from bots, or add a nofollow or something?
Enrique
-
Being dinged for duplicate content would be penalized as whole on your website, not just by page.
If the post is original and you just have a picture of the book with a sentence or two of it's description, I do not think that would harm or trigger a filter on your website.
They usually go for "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar"
-
In a blog post titled "Beating Google's Panda Update - 5 Deadly Content Sins"..... Cyrus says.....
"Remember, Panda is a site-wide penalty, not a page penalty. So if a certain percentage of your pages fall below Panda’s quality algorithm, then the whole site suffers. Fix enough of these pages and you may recover."
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
-
Question about creating content pages for keywords
Good morning, We are trying to rank our India based company which provides the following services
On-Page Optimization | | harshal.khatavkar
Engineering Design Services
Architectural Design Services
MEP Design Services Our target audiences are in the US and UK. Offcource, we are targetting above services keywords on most of our main pages and created dedicated services pages too. But lately, we found out that we are ranking well for keywords like Outsourcing Engineering Design Services, Outsourcing Architectural Design Services, etc... which are actually very very good keywords in terms of closing the leads/inquiries as people are actually looking out for outsourcing but the search count for those keywords is low. (though we closed 2 inquiries from those keywords). These pages we created in past just to increase the content of the website. I really want to give it a try to target those keywords by creating more pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc... My question is if we create more and more pages around those keywords then will it affect the rankings of the pages which are already ranking for those keywords or will the new pages compete against those pages or the new pages will help to boost current pages? We can write good content and blog posts on the outsourcing topic but not sure if we should create new pages or increase the length of the existing pages. Can you guys please help with some directions on this as I really don't want to take the wrong route. Look forward! Regards0 -
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Moving content from one site to another
I have a couple established, content rich sites with some content that I would like to move over to a new site. My question is what steps I need to take to ensure that neither my older sites nor newer sites are penalized for duplicate content. The purpose for moving the content is to add some depth to the new site for users, as well as possibly optimize it all for SEO. There is a fair amount of content involved, about 50 posts and pages per site, so I'd like to know if the potential problem with duplicate content might be serious enough that I should think twice. What do you recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Duplicate Page Content on Empty Manufacturer Pages
I work for an internet retailer that specializes in pet supplies and medications. I was going through the Crawl Diagnostics for our website, and I saw in the Duplicate Page Content section that some of our manufacturer pages were getting flagged. The way our site is set up is that when products are discontinued we mark them as discontinued and use 301 redirects to redirect their URLs to other relevant products, brands, or our homepage. We do the same thing with brand and manufacturer pages if all of their products are discontinued. 90% of the time, this is a manual process. However, the other 10% of the time certain products come and go automatically as part of our inventory system with one of our fulfillment partners. This can sometimes create empty manufacturer pages. I can't redirect these empty pages because there's a chance that products will be brought back in stock and the page will be populated again. What can we do so that these pages won't get marked as duplicates while they're empty? Write unique short descriptions about the companies? Would the placement of these short descriptions matter--top of the page under the category name vs bottom of the page underneath where the products would go? The links in the left sidebar, top, and in the footer our part of our site architecture, so those are always going to be the same. To contrast, here's what a manufacturer page with products looks like: Thanks! http://www.vetdepot.com/littermaid-manufacturer.html
On-Page Optimization | | ElDude0 -
Home Page Content - In a Div?
Is putting content in a div so it doesn't muck up the look of the home page create a problem in doing well organically? Example - http://www.callawaygardens.com. We have lots of clients that want no text on the home page and we are trying to figure out how to do this while still ranking well organically. What are your thoughts? Can we get in trouble? Are there negative impacts with SEO doing it like this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStream80 -
DUPLICATE PAGE TITLE ISSUE
Hi We have 25 pages with a download form on it. People arrive at the page through a ink with optimised anchor text which sits on the information pages. As there is no information on these pages we do not need them to be optimised so the developer has given all the download pages exactly the same page title. Although the pages in themselves are not significant would this effect the way Google viewed the whole site, and would it pay to make each one unique or doesn't it really matter. Alternatively, is there a better way to handle this? and if so would that ligate the benefit of the anchor text. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920 -
Best Way to check for duplicate pages
With Google's updates we know they want to clean out duplicate content. i have been seeing the same crap spit out even word for word on different sites. Anyway how do you experienced SEO people test for dups on your own site as well as other sites. The only thing i can come up with is paying copyscape 5 cts a test. There has to be other ways. Advise/
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990 -
On-page optimisation for CMS based sites
With so many sites being based on a CMS, and with so many hundreds of different CMS out there, as SEO consultants how do you recommend dealing with on-page optimisation for a client where you discover their site is built with a CMS you have not previously used (or even heard of!)
On-Page Optimization | | bjalc20110