Question about copying content
-
Hi there,
I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this?
Here a few ideas I was thinking of:
-
I was thinking they put canonical tags on all pages where they have copied our content?
-
They copy the content but leave all anchor text in place?
Please let me know your thoughts.
Kind Regards
-
-
Hi Adam,
Thanks for your reply.
I suppose what I could do is mention to them that if they are taking content from our website, they must have at the bottom of each page 'Text supplied by Company Name' the company name supplies a keyword that we target.
I have actually just noticed that there are many retailers out there who are copying our content from our product pages without me knowing, I noticed this by copying a pasting the first paragraph of a number of my product pages, however what is strange that these websites come above my product pages, is this something to worry about? is Google giving me full credit for these pages?
Kind Regards
-
I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this?
Well firstly, there is no SEO benefit to either party here unless the retailer provides a link to your site. This can actually cause damage to the retailer's site with regards to duplicate content issues. Forget about canonical tags here, they are not designed to avoid duplicate content issues when copying someone else's content.
My advice would be to advise the retailer to create their own unique content rather than copying your content. They can provide links to product pages on your site but they should try to create unique descriptions for the products rather than copying your content.
With regard to other retailers copying your content, they do so at their own risk as Google could decide to penalise these sites (assuming they haven't already done so). It is best practice to create unique content rather than copying other people's content.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Mat,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, there is a lot of work that goes into the content for product pages, blog posts etc.
I think most of the content that they want is for our products they are going to be selling on their website, so they are in need of content for these pages, but not really sure on how to handle this best (SEO benefit)
I had recently stumbled upon retailer websites who have copied our content without actually asking us, however some of those websites have kept the anchor text, we are getting some benefit, right?
Kind Regards
-
Canonical might work. However I wouldn't let them have it. If the content is good then it has too much value.
Maybe instead you could suggest that you do a regular guest spot for them, including your link in the profile.
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 content with URLs
Hi all, Do you think that is possible to have duplicate content issues because we provide a unique image with 5 different URLs ? In the HTML code pages, just one URL is provide. It's enough for that Google don't see the other URLs or not ? Example, in this article : http://www.parismatch.com/People/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112 The same image is available on: http://cdn-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize1-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize2-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize3-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg Thank you very much for your help. Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Julien.Ferras0 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
E-Commerce Panda Question
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank well, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
Faceted Navigation and Dupe Content
Hi, We have a Magento website using layered navigation - it has created a lot of duplicate content and I did ask Google in GWT to "No URLS" most of the querystrings except the "p" which is for pagination. After reading how to tackle this issue, I tried to tackle it using a combination of Meta Noindex, Robots, Canonical but still it was a snowball I was trying to control. In the end, I opted for using Ajax for the layered navigation - no matter what option is selected there is no parameters latched on to the url, so no dupe/near dupe URL's created. So please correct me if I am wrong, but no new links flow to those extra URL's now so presumably in due course Google will remove them from the index? Am I correct in thinking that? Plus these extra URL's have Meta Noindex on them too - I still have tens of thousands of pages indexed in Google. How long will it take for Google to remove them from index? Will having Meta No Index on the pages that need to be removed help? Any other way of removing thousands of URLS from GWT? Thanks again, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Anchor Text to Content Ratio
My Home Page has about 500 words of content, but when I crawl the text it brings up about 1400 total words when counting all the anchor text links (I believe all are in the navigation or images). All of the link are internal and relevant (it's a huge site), but I am worried that they are diluting the copy. Is that likely the case? What's a good ratio? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanArizona0 -
Remove content that is indexed?
Hi guys, I want to delete a entire folder with content indexed, how i can explain to google that content no longer exists?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0