Duplicate biographies across several domains?
-
Hey Gang,
We've built a niche specific, manually edited legal community that is full of unique content. (While it's ultimately a directory, and that is often viewed as a bad word in these times, ours is a curated source that doesn't allow anyone and everyone to join.) We feel comfortable that it passes the sniff test post-panda/penguin, etc., and its doing rather well to date.
The question we have is do we really need to create unique biographies for each of our legal members? Some of our competitors simply use the same bio information that the lawyer has on their own website and copies that to their site. The competitors I'm talking about are LARGE, well-respected, extremely successful folks, like FindLaw.
Here's an example:
Both rank, etc., and the FindLaw code doesn't place any restrictions on their content regarding the bio., and it's an obvious exact match.
I get that duplicate content is primarily a concern among one's own URL and the pages across a specific domain, using rel-canonical, etc., but what about two different domains that need to supply factual information that can't be altered? Is it anything we should worry ourselves with? Any tags we should insert in our code with regard to the bios?
Thanks!!!
Wayne
-
Thanks, Oleg! I was thinking along the same lines, but it's a bit difficult to reproduce a person's biography, as it is such specific information, e.g., Schools they graduated from, where they worked, experience, etc. And since that's the only information on that page, it makes it a bit tough, indeed!
-
You will have a much easier time ranking if you provide unique biographies instead of scraping something that already appears on several websites. Like you said, those sites are huge and have a lot of authority so they will rank and you wont.
However, if the scraped bio is just a portion of the page and the rest of the page is unique, valuable information, that would help offset the copied content. Next time a panda refresh comes around, you'll know if you got hit with a duplicate content penalty.
-Oleg
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 Blog pages across different domains
Hey Moz Community, I have 3 Duplicate websites which more or less contain the same blog article ( they are copy & paste from the original website ). I am now in the process of changing my duplicate websites and I stumbled upon this problem: if I have to change the content for all the duplicate articles I have across my different domains it would be a very time consuming task and on the other hand I don't want to no index, follow the duplicate articles because I want to use them for SEO purposes. Should I only change the articles that brought significant traffic and no index, follow the rest ? What do you think ? Thanks, Anddrei
On-Page Optimization | | kiraftw0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Issue
Hello Mozzers! We have a client going through a website revamp. The client is The Michelangelo Hotel, and they are part of Star Hotels. Star Hotels plans to create a section on their site for The Michelangelo, as opposed to maintaining a stand alone site. They will then take the michelangelohotel.com domain, and point it to the corresponding pages on the Star site. The guest will key in www.michelangelohotel.com, and will see the same content that can be found on www.starhotel.com/en/michelangelo-hotel-new-york. The problem we have is this: Essentially the same content will be indexed twice, once on starhotels.com and once on michelangelohotel.com. This would seem to cause a duplicate content issue. What are your thoughts? Edit: I apologize, because I was not nearly clear enough here. The Star Hotels site will have 5 pages dedicated to The Michelangelo Hotel. The content will sit solely on that server as those 5 pages. Those 5 pages will each be indexed as 2 URLs. www.michelangelohotel.com <-> www.starhotels.com/en/michelangelo/ www.michelangelohotel.com/accommodations <-> www.starhotels.com/en/michelangelo/accommodations And so on. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | FrankSweeney0 -
404 crawl errors with all url+domain
We have 187 crawl 404 errors. All urls on web make a 404 error that this http://www.domain.com/[.....]l/www.domain.com all errors added to the url, the url domain I put an example gestoriabarcelona.com/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
On-Page Optimization | | promonet
gestoriabarcelona.com/tarifas/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
gestoriabarcelona.com/category/noticias/page/7/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
gestoriabarcelona.com/2012/08/amortizacion-de-unaconstruccion/
www.gestoriabarcelona.com
[..] I don't know where can i find to solve errors Anyone can help me? Thanks0 -
Small Title Differences cause duplicate errors
My site titles have 3 features in them. Just 1 varies and I am getting duplicate title errors. I'm thinking of moving the different feature from the 2nd position to the start of the title. Doese anyone think this would help? Any other suggestions for a simple fix? Thank You Handcrafter The titles look like this: Green Measuring Cups|Pewter Post|By JohnMiller Green Measuring Cups|Cherry Post|By JohnMiller Green Measuring Cups|Pewter Strip|By JohnMiller
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0 -
Creating Duplicate Content on Shopping Sites
I have a client with an eCommerce site that is interested in adding their products to shopping sites. If we use the same information that is on the site currently, will we run into duplicate content issues when those same products & descriptions are published on shopping sites? Is it best practice to rewrite the product title and descriptions for shopping sites to avoid duplicate content issues?
On-Page Optimization | | mj7750 -
Why is our site dropping in Domain Authority
Hi all, I have a question. I have been working SEO on our site www.betxpert.com for the last 4-6 weeks and I have been looking forward to seeing the new DA and PA numbers. However today, our DA is now 30...where it was 31 or 33 a couple of days ago. How come the decrease? I have only improved the site i should say... Hope someone can shed a little light on the issue... -Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Duplicate Content Warning
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the duplicate content warnings I am recieving for some of my pages. I noticed that the below pattern of URLs are being flagged as duplicate content. I understand that these are seen as two different pages but I would like to know if this has an negative impact on my SEO? Why is this happening? How do I stop it from happening? http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html?sef_rewrite=1 http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | mozmonkey0