Duplicate content q - Can search engines tell where the original text was copied from?
-
I was under the impression that when a search engine comes across duplicate content it won't be able to determine which one is the original. Is this not the case?
-
Not sure canonical tags work that way! You use the canonical tag to provide the search engines with the "official" URL of your content. This is especially useful when you're using a CMS that delivers your content on a number of alternate urls. It won't help search engines determine the "owner" of the content.
Matt Cutts has said that Google is getting better at identifying the original owner of the site, but it's not perfect. Google don't have a magic way of seeing everything that goes on, they have to crawl which takes time.
I don't know if it would help if you manually submit your page to google using the Google Webmaster tools / fetch as googlebot option as soon as you purplish your page. Might help get your page into the index first. Not exactly a scalable approach if you're publishing a lot of material though.
One of the best ways of protecting yourself is to embed relevant (absolute) links into the body of your content pointing to related articles on your own site. One website I'm working on gets a surprising number of referrals that way! Oh,also think about adding links to your new content from some of your older content, if it's relevant and makes sense to do so.
Authorship markup might also help.
-
What if both sites added canonical tags on their content?
-
That all depends if the site that you have taken the content from has placed canonical tags on there content which says that there site was the original owner of the content. This means that you will get seen as having duplicate content and they wont.
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
-
How to avoid duplicate content on internal search results page?
Hi, according to Webmaster Tools and Siteliner our website have an above-average amount of duplicate content. Most of the pages are the search results pages, where it finds only one result. The only difference in this case are the TDK, H1 and the breadcrumbs. The rest of the layout is pretty static and similar. Here is an example for two pages with "duplicate content": https://soundbetter.com/search/Globo https://soundbetter.com/search/Volvo Edit: These are legitimate results that happen to have the same result. In this case we want users to be able to find the audio engineers by 'credits' (musicians they've worked with). Tags. We want users to rank for people searching for 'engineers who worked with'. And searching for two different artists (credit tags) returns this one service provider, with different urls (the tag being the search parameter) hence the duplicate content. I guess every e-commerce/directory website faces this kind of issue. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content on search results page?
Technical SEO | | ShaqD1 -
Duplicate Content - Captcha on Contact Form
I am going to be working on a site where the contact form is being flagged as duplicate content the URL is the same apart from having: /contact/10119 contact/31010 ...at the end of it. The only difference in the content of the page that I can see is the Captcha numbers? Is there a way to overcome this to stop duplicate content? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate Content?
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.) But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it? Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
Technical SEO | | sakeith0 -
Avoiding Cannibalism and Duplication with content
Hi, For the example I will use a computers e-commerce store... I'm working on creating guides for the store -
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
How to choose a laptop
How to choose a desktop I believe that each guide will be great on its own and that it answers a specific question (meaning that someone looking for a laptop will search specifically laptop info and the same goes for desktop). This is why I didn't creating a "How to choose a computer" guide. I also want each guide to have all information and not to start sending the user to secondary pages in order to fill in missing info. However, even though there are several details that are different between the laptops and desktops, like importance of weight, screen size etc., a lot of things the checklist (like deciding on how much memory is needed, graphic card, core etc.) are the same. Please advise on how to pursue it. Should I just write two guides and make sure that the same duplicated content ideas are simply written in a different way?0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
Duplicate content
I have two page, where the second makes a duplicate content from the first Example:www.mysite.com/mypagewww.mysite.com/mysecondpageIf i insert still making duplicate content?Best regards,Wendel
Technical SEO | | peopleinteractive0 -
How to prevent directory from being accessed by search engines?
Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0