How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
-
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author?
Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A.
Will that work, or is there a better solution?
This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
-
Thanks grasshopper!
-
No; site B is using Spry, a now defunct Adobe framework: http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2012/08/update-on-adobe-spry-framework-availability.html
Site A uses ExpressionEngine.
-
Hi Allie,
You're absolutely on the right track. Cross-domain canonicalization was created to deal with situations exactly like the one you're describing. I've used it many times, and it works great.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
Im pretty sure you can trackback to the original.. Are you using wordpress?
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
-
Upper and lower case URLS coming up as duplicate content
Hey guys and gals, I'm having a frustrating time with an issue. Our site has around 10 pages that are coming up as duplicate content/ duplicate title. I'm not sure what I can do to fix this. I was going to attempt to 301 direct the upper case to lower but I'm worried how this will affect our SEO. can anyone offer some insight on what I should be doing? Update: What I'm trying to figure out is what I should do for our URL's. For example, when I run an audit I'm getting two different pages: aaa.com/BusinessAgreement.com and also aaa.com/businessagreement.com. We don't have two pages but for some reason, Google thinks we do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmac1 -
Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Concerns of Duplicative Content on Purchased Site
Recently I purchased a site of 50+ DA (oldsite.com) that had been offline/404 for 9-12 months from the previous owner. The purchase included the domain and the content previously hosted on the domain. The backlink profile is 100% contextual and pristine. Upon purchasing the domain, I did the following: Rehosted the old site and content that had been down for 9-12 months on oldsite.com Allowed a week or two for indexation on oldsite.com Hosted the old content on my newsite.com and then performed 100+ contextual 301 redirects from the oldsite.com to newsite.com using direct and wild card htaccess rules Issued a Press Release declaring the acquisition of oldsite.com for newsite.com Performed a site "Change of Name" in Google from oldsite.com to newsite.com Performed a site "Site Move" in Bing/Yahoo from oldsite.com to newsite.com It's been close to a month and while organic traffic is growing gradually, it's not what I would expect from a domain with 700+ referring contextual domains. My current concern is around original attribution of content on oldsite.com shifting to scraper sites during the year or so that it was offline. For Example: Oldsite.com has full attribution prior to going offline Scraper sites scan site and repost content elsewhere (effort unsuccessful at time because google know original attribution) Oldsite.com goes offline Scraper sites continue hosting content Google loses consumer facing cache from oldsite.com (and potentially loses original attribution of content) Google reassigns original attribution to a scraper site Oldsite.com is hosted again and Google no longer remembers it's original attribution and thinks content is stolen Google then silently punished Oldsite.com and Newsite.com (which it is redirected to) QUESTIONS Does this sequence have any merit? Does Google keep track of original attribution after the content ceases to exist in Google's search cache? Are there any tools or ways to tell if you're being punished for content being posted else on the web even if you originally had attribution? Unrelated: Are there any other steps that are recommend for a Change of site as described above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PetSite0 -
Questions about duplicate photo content?
I know that Google is a mystery, so I am not sure if there are answers to these questions, but I'm going to ask anyway! I recently realized that Google is not happy with duplicate photo content. I'm a photographer and have sold many photos in the past (but retained the rights for) that I am now using on my site. My recent revelations means that I'm now taking down all of these photos. So I've been reverse image searching all of my photos to see if I let anyone else use it first, and in the course of this I found out that there are many of my photos being used by other sites on the web. So my questions are: With photos that I used first and others have stolen, If I edit these photos (to add copyright info) and then re-upload them, will the sites that are using these images then get credit for using the original image first? If I have a photo on another one of my own sites and I take it down, can I safely use that photo on my main site, or will Google retain the knowledge that it's been used somewhere else first? If I sold a photo and it's being used on another site, can I safely use a different photo from the same series that is almost exactly the same? I am unclear what data from the photo Google is matching, and if they can tell the difference between photos that were taken a few seconds apart.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lina5000 -
Glossary index and individual pages create duplicate content. How much might this hurt me?
I've got a glossary on my site with an index page for each letter of the alphabet that has a definition. So the M section lists every definition (the whole definition). But each definition also has its own individual page (and we link to those pages internally so the user doesn't have to hunt down the entire M page). So I definitely have duplicate content ... 112 instances (112 terms). Maybe it's not so bad because each definition is just a short paragraph(?) How much does this hurt my potential ranking for each definition? How much does it hurt my site overall? Am I better off making the individual pages no-index? or canonicalizing them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeadSEOlogist0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Dealing with close content - duplicate issue for closed products
Hello I'm dealing with some issues. Moz analyses is telling me that I have duplicate on some of my products pages. My issue is that: Concern very similar products IT products are from the same range Just the name and pdf are different Do you think I should use canonical url ? Or it will be better to rewrite about 80 descriptions (but description will be almost the same) ? Best regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0