Avoid Duplicate Content Penalty

[Madnesz]

Hello,

I was wondering about the following problem and I hope that anyone can give me some advice on this:

I operate several websites. Every website tries to target a different niche, so it was a strategic choice to not combine them all in one website, but to run them under different domains.
However, some articles I wrote are about quite general topics and I believe them to be valuable content for more than one website. However, I am afraid that if I upload the article to more than one of my websites, Google might penalize me for duplicate content. Is there anyway to avoid this?

Help much appreciated...

[Chips]

Personally, I would avoid publishing the article on more than one site. The duplicate content may not earn a penalty but it will have a detrimental effect on your serps for the article. It would be best to have original content on each site. You could publish the same topic but be sure that you don't just "copy and paste". I think the time you spend writing 3 or 4 original articles will pay off in the short and long term.

[JohnV]

If you think the article might be of use on all sites you could perhaps add no index tags for the article page on all but one of the sites, which is best suited for direct searches to the article.

[universal4]

Or you could post a very small portion of it, or critique it and link to the article thus adding a bit more link juice to the origianl article page in question.

Rick
Universal4

[elgoog]

If you think the article might be of use on all sites you could perhaps add no index tags for the article page on all but one of the sites, which is best suited for direct searches to the article.

Nice one!

[Doolally]

I don't think posting it on all sites will get any Google penalty. What Google is more likely to do is pick the one that it thinks is on the most relevant site and give that page the kudos. The pages on the other site will just not rank anywhere highly.

I like Ricks suggestion though, post the article on one site and post an intro/teaser on the other sites with a link to the full article.

[Madnesz]

I took another look at the Google Webmaster Guidelines and they state the following:

Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.

So I guess the canonical method is the way to go here...

[patmcluk]

I don't know what "canonical" means so i would be very interested in the meaning. The reason being that i DO post quite a few articles on other sites, but i've always believed that if you credit the originating website, then google doesn't penalize you.

Does this "canonical" thing mean i'm wrong?

[TheGamblingGuru]

Hello,

I was wondering about the following problem and I hope that anyone can give me some advice on this:

I operate several websites. Every website tries to target a different niche, so it was a strategic choice to not combine them all in one website, but to run them under different domains.
However, some articles I wrote are about quite general topics and I believe them to be valuable content for more than one website. However, I am afraid that if I upload the article to more than one of my websites, Google might penalize me for duplicate content. Is there anyway to avoid this?

Help much appreciated...

Madnesz, here is a video you may be interested in that addresses your concern...

http://videos.webpronews.com/2007/02...various-sites/

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[CityGuard]

I first heard of the rel=canonical tag back in March of this year. I'm not positive when it was first created, but I recall it being a fairly recent development at the time.

The tag enables a site that has near-identical versions of a page to specify which version is preferred, and passes the ranking values of the non-preferred version onto the preferred version. It works across sub-domains but does not pass value across different domains. Ultimately it sounds like it helps the preferred page rank a bit better.

In Madnesz case, I'm not sure the canonical tag solves the problem since it sounds like the issue is articles duplicated across different domains and the canonical purportedly only passes value for duplication within the same domain. I say purportedly because I haven't seen testing on this, although it is believable and makes sense to me because otherwise it could be easily to manipulate.

Here are some resources about it that I found helpful:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html


In terms of whether to share articles across multiple sites you operate, we do this quite a bit in the Casino City sites. The way we handle it is we determine which site should be seen as the source of the article, and then the versions used elsewhere link back to the one we'd like considered to be the main source.

I took another look at the Google Webmaster Guidelines and they state the following:

Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.

So I guess the canonical method is the way to go here...

I don't know what "canonical" means so i would be very interested in the meaning. The reason being that i DO post quite a few articles on other sites, but i've always believed that if you credit the originating website, then google doesn't penalize you.

Does this "canonical" thing mean i'm wrong?

[bbonline]

I fully know something about canonical issues. And i saw one good plug ins for blogs specially like me who runs a wordpress blog, http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/

[Chips]

I fully know something about canonical issues. And i saw one good plug ins for blogs specially like me who runs a wordpress blog, http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/

And... there is a Matt Cutts video there that explains canonical url use, after watching the video I finally had a grasp of what it was after hearing it for a good while. I would recommend watching the video, it is 20 minutes well spent.

As far as the plug in goes, if you are using the "All in One SEO" plug in, there is a tick box in the settings for "use canonical url's" I looked at the source code of one of my WP posts and the canonical element is there. So no need for the yoast.com plug in (as far as I can see).

[patmcluk]

I use all-in-one but have always left the "canonical url" box unticked because i didn't know the meaning lol.
So you recommend ticking it then, if you use the same post on various sites?

[megan isla]

The emerging of "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is one of the biggest change to SEO best practices since Sitemaps. Search engine will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore.

[dhayman]

Hello,

I was wondering about the following problem and I hope that anyone can give me some advice on this:

I operate several websites. Every website tries to target a different niche, so it was a strategic choice to not combine them all in one website, but to run them under different domains.
However, some articles I wrote are about quite general topics and I believe them to be valuable content for more than one website. However, I am afraid that if I upload the article to more than one of my websites, Google might penalize me for duplicate content. Is there anyway to avoid this?

Help much appreciated...

Google won't penalize you for duplicate content, BUT if it determines content to be duplicated, then it will only rank the content for the site it determines to be its true author. That sounds like a difficult algorithm to implement, but the infamous Matt Cutts has stated this in the past.

[casinojack]

I have never seen evidence of the so called "penalty", I believe it to be a myth.

[patmcluk]

Yes I agree. I use duplicate material all the time and my rankings keep going up.
As long as you have a majority of original content Google doesn't care much!

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Look for an article spinner. I know SENuke or XRumer has one. There are some free ones but they aren't very good.

I'm finishing up a top-notch one now and should have it live (and free) after the LAC.

Gary

[patmcluk]

I bought the MAGIC Spinner and it seems pretty good. I also bought the submitter and have sent off a few articles. There have been about 250 accepted so far but I am still waiting to see the links appear.
Fingers crossed!

[casinojack]

Best free spinner is:

http://thebestspinner.com/