Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
-
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it?
Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere.
Thanks!
-
You can do it yourself or hire someone who will do a good job.
Who does the writing is less important than the quality of the description, its ability to convert the buyer and its viability in the search engines.
I write all of my own descriptions... but I am really familiar with what I sell and would not trust it to anybody else.
-
So you're saying I should not have someone re-write it because I should do it myself? Or you're saying I should certainly have someone re-write as opposed to using the duplicate content?
-
The guy who rewrites everything to produce substantive content will have a nice advantage on everyone who is using the standard descriptions.
If you want the advantage you do the work.
-
Re-writing everything would be ideal but it might be costly if you really have a lot of content.
You will have to weigh out the pros and cons.
-
It's quite a bit and I don't have the time to re-write everything.
It's certainly worth the cost to pay someone to re-write all of it though?
-
You should always want to get any advantage on SEO. So I'd suggest changing up the content just a bit unless you don't have the manpower to do all of them.
Negative would being flagged as spam for duplicate content, however is sometimes rare for shorter descriptions.
Larger bulks of content could be more likely to be flagged, so I'd keep that in mind.
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
-
To what extent is content considered unique or duplicate?
I work primarily on classifieds websites and an issue I consistently come across are two or more URLs which have the exact same ad count, due to site structure and the way everything is categorized. An example of such would be with these two pages: https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/motorboats/princess https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/boats-for-sale/princess/power These two have the exact same number of ads- would search engines mark these as duplicate content? Both have different meta descriptions, title tags etc. but essentially the MC is exactly the same. If they are, what would be the best course to remedy the problem? I'm skeptical about using canonical tags as I generally use them for exact duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Canonical Tags - Do they only apply to internal duplicate content?
Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | benj20341 -
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 -
A problem with duplicate content
I'm kind of new at this. My crawl anaylsis says that I have a problem with duplicate content. I set the site up so that web sections appear in a folder with an index page as a landing page for that section. The URL would look like: www.myweb.com/section/index.php The crawl analysis says that both that URL and its root: www.myweb.com/section/ have been indexed. So I appear to have a situation where the page has been indexed twice and is a duplicate of itself. What can I do to remedy this? And, what steps should i take to get the pages re-indexed so that this type of duplication is avoided? I hope this makes sense! Any help gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850