How to publish duplicate content legitimately without Panda problems
-
Let's imagine that you own a successful website that publishes a lot of syndicated news articles and syndicated columnists.
Your visitors love these articles and columns but the search engines see them as duplicate content.
You worry about being viewed as a "content farm" because of this duplicate content and getting the Panda penalty.
So, you decide to continue publishing the content and use...
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
This allows you do display the content for your visitors but it should stop the search engines from indexing any pages with this code. It should also allow robots to spider the pages and pass link value through them.
I have two questions.....
-
If you use "noindex" will that be enough to prevent your site from being considered as a content farm?
-
Is there a better way to continue publication of syndicated content but protect the site from duplicate content problems?
-
-
Good idea about attributing with rel=canonical.
Thanks!
-
Noindexing the syndicated articles should, in theory, minimize the likelihood of having a Panda problem, but it seems like Panda is constantly evolving. You will probably see some kind of drop in rankings as the number of indexed pages of for site will decrease. If you have say, 1000 pages total on the site and suddenly 900 are taken out of the index, this might be a problem. If it is a much smaller percentage of the site, you might not have a problem at all. Other than the number of indexed pages, I don't think you will have a problem once the syndicated stuff is noindexed.
It will probably take Google a while to re-index/un-index the pages, so hopefully it won't be a fast drop if there is one. In the long run, it is probably better to at least have the appearance of trying to do the right thing. Linking to the source, and maybe using rel=canonical tags to the original article would also be a good practice. -
Thank you, Nick.
We will be using the "noindex" only on the pages with syndicated content. This is a DreamWeaver site and it is easy to place the code on specific pages and does not use excerpts.
Do you still see a potential problem?
The question really is... "Could a site that contains a lot of syndicated content have a Panda problem if the pages that contain that content are noindexed?"
-
I am assuming you intend to use no index only on the duplicate content articles. Using no index on everything would also prevent your content from being indexed and found through Google.
If you are using Wordpress or something else that will allow showing excerpts, you could try making the article pages noindex and show only excerpts on the main page and category pages which would be indexed and followed. I think that would make the articles not appear in searches and avoid duplicate content penalties, while allowing the pages that show the excerpts to still be indexed and rank OK.
The idea here is that the pages showing the excerpts would have enough text to help the home and category pages to rank for the subject matter and hopefully not be seen as what it is - copied content.
You will probably eventually get caught by the Panda, but this may work as a temporary solution until you can get some original content mixed in.
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 and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
How does Google view duplicate photo content?
Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening? I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Duplicated content on subcategory pages: how do I fix it?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
I manage an e-commerce website and we have a duplicated content issue for subcategory. The scenario is like this: /category1/subcategory1
/category2/subcategory1
/category3/subcategory1 A single subcategory can fit multiple categories, so we have 3 different URL for the same subcategory with the same content (except of the navigation link). Which are the best practice to avoid this issue? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate Content
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
Caps in URL creating duplicate content
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi everyone, I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have. www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116 Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it? At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How can i see the pages that cause duplicate content?
SEOmoz PRO is giving me back duplicate content errors. However, i don't see how i can get a list of pages that are duplicate to the one shown. If i don't know which pages/urls cause the issue i can't really fix it. The only way would be placing canonical tags but that's not always the best solution. Is there a way to see the actual duplicate pages?
Technical SEO | | 5MMedia0