A contact of ours would like to repost our blog content on their website but I’ve always been told not to do this as it would be seen as duplicate content by google and hurt our SEO and drive traffic away. Is this correct?
It is indeed bad practice. Google is good at picking up who posted the article first and who has the duplicate content. If your contact is ok with it they can add a canonical tag pointing to the page that they took the content from that will make clear to google that they do not want rankings from doing so and that the original content is at your page.
Regards
Related
I am making a social network application where user will come and share the posts like facebook. But now I have some doubts like lets say a user is just shared a content by coping it from another site and same with the case of images. So does google crawler consider it as a duplicate content or not?
If yes then how I can tell to the google crawler that "don't consider it as a spam, its a social networking site and the content is shared by the user not by the me". Is there any way or any kind of technique that help me.
Google might consider it to be duplicate content, in which case the search algorithm will choose 1 version, which it believes to be the original or more important one and drop the other.
This isn't a bad thing per se - unless you see that most of your site's content is becoming duplicated.
You can use canonical URL declarations to do what you are saying, but i wouldn't advise it.
If your website belongs to one of these types - forum or e-commerce, it will not be punished for duplicate content issue. I think "social platform" is one type of forum.
If your pages are too similar, the result is that the two or more similar pages will scatter the click rate, flow etc, so the rank in SERPs may not look well.
I suggest do not use "canonical" because this instruction tell the crawlers do not crawl/count this page. If you use it, in the webmaster tool, you will see the indexed pages decrease a lot.
Do not too worry about the duplicate content issue. You can see this article: Google’s Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content Won’t Hurt You, Unless It Is Spammy
I read about canonical tags in HTML and from what I understood it is used to help search engines to realize which is the original content. I have articles in my recently created blog, which I have pasted in certain other popular websites. In those websites I gave back a link to my original blog post with the canonical tag. But yet my blog page is not visible in search engines (other websites do show my article). Before I had pasted onto other websites, my articles were indexed on google and could be seen on the 1st page. So I guess, there is no problem on my SEO part.
Can someone please suggest a method where my original blog gets higher preference for the content?
You can use cross domain canonical tags.
So if you have duplicated content on other domains you can use the canonical tag on those pages pointing back to the original page on your site.
This a great way to deal with syndicated content; of course you would need code level access on these other websites so you can implement the canonical tag.
More info below
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Don't just copy paste your articles on every place on the internet, that will not do you any good. After writing a good article go to other sites and write something else about your articles like what your article is about, how it is helpful to someone, something like that so that people and websites come to your website to read your article. For this you don't need "canonical"
If you copy paste articles to other websites, it will only create duplicate content issues and will only harm your SEO efforts.
No, it is not required for your Blog section to do canonical issue.
Canonical means Google displays same pages with different URL.
The first thing is not submitting your article in different websites I will not give you any benefit in your ranking. If you write a good and quality content you should post in only one website if you post in different sited google will consider as a duplicate content. So it's better for you you can share your approved blog link in social media sites and also do social bookmarking, microblogging. And after you don't need canonical tag.
As #moobot said you can indeed use a cross-domain canonical tag to let Google know about the original source of the content. How exactly are you adding the canonical on other domains?
The canonical link should be in the head section of the html code. If you're adding it yourself somewhere in the body tag that's not going to do you any good.
Check out this article for some other common mistakes with the canonical tag
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
#metadice mentioned that copying your content all over the web isn't good for your SEO and i agree completely. If you do this for some extra backlinks or something i would recommend you to stop doing this.
Hope my answer will help someone who has this same question.
Here'y the story: I have a website for a local company that publishes quality content to an on-site blog. We're expanding to a new geographic region, and I'm in the process of building another website targeting the new region.
I'd like to include a blog on the new website, which will pull in any content/posts from our existing blog. I primarily want to do this for the added SEO benefit of having fresh, relevant content that's frequently updated on your website. However, I would of course need to add a rel=canonical link back to the original blog in order to ensure I don't get any duplicate content penalties from posting the same content across two separate domains.
My question is whether adding that rel=canonical link will eliminate the SEO value of that content being posted to the new website?
I'm not really talking about which blog post would show up in SERPs, as I understand that the point of the rel=canonical tag is to provide attribution to the primary source of the content. I'm more concerned about whether using a rel=canonical on the content would eliminate the secondary SEO benefit of having relevant, frequently updated content on your website, due to Google being essentially "blind" to the duplicate content.
In most cases the answer on your question is "yes". With regard to Google - GoogleAnswers (see the last question).
Other search engines can not maintain this attribute.
Regards.
If you pull content from somewhere else to post, it isn't "fresh". Fresh content is newly written. You won't get any credit for fresh content whether or not you use rel=canonical
The canonical tag behaves in a similar way to a 301 redirect. That is, ranking that the page with the canonical tag has will mostly get transferred to the page it points it.
My neighbour popped over last night to ask me for help with regards to his company's website. He said that it used to be ranked pretty high on Google but has since fallen off completely.
Now, I'm a Windows App programmer hence my request for help. I took a look and there the meta tags seem ok. I recommended that he add a <h1>heading</h1> to the pages with a page title to help reinforce the content.
I also suggested that finding related websites and getting them to link to his site was good for search ranking.
Are there any other general strategies / tools that could help?
He site is: http://www.colofinder.co.uk/
ps. BTW: this isn't just an attempt to have StackOverflow link to my neighbour's site - I'm aware that links from SO don't add to its ranking.
Go to http://ooyes.net/blog/a-step-by-step-15-minute-seo-audit-%28a-sample-from-seo-secrets%29 and read it. Then go to http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/ and read it. Then go to your friends site and look at it with that information in mind. Off the top of my head, I would add flip the company name and page title in the "title" tags. Look at the google analytics account and see how people are coming to the site. That will give you an idea of where you should start your efforts to build a workable base.
First of all he needs to be make sure that his website contents are well managed and to the point. Then Page title has to be pin point, meta tags are obsolete so try meta description. Then Main Heading should be under h1 tag, sub heading under h2 and further sub heading h3. Try to update your website one in a month.
Use community websites like Facebook, Twitter and linkidin and other related forums for posting updates about completed projects and must give inbound links. You can use your company name as an inlink to your primary website and project name as an inlink of subpage of your company website.
Keep on posting at least once in a week. Post website URL to online directories will be a great help. Do not use Blackhat SEO techniques like cloaking. Do not use any invisible text/div in your website. Make sure that whenever you give your website link any where, give the most to the point and appropriate link.
Your link should have to have that stuff against you are posting your link/sublink. Make a section on your website for tag clouds/google tags, this will be a great attraction for search engines and they will link your website to other popular websites.
Make sure these tags should be directed to top ranking website which should have relevant material. I hope this will help. Feel free if you have trouble to understand anything i have mentioned above. Best of Luck
i have a blog build in wordpress, And my domain name is like example.com (i can't give you the original name, because some times the editors will mark this question as SPAM :( , and if any one really want to check directly from my site will add at the end of the question.)
http://example.com and the blog name is http://example.com/articles/
and the sitemap.xml is available in http://example.com/sitemap.xml
Google daily visit my site and all my new articles were crawled, if i search the "articles title + example.com " will get the search result from the google , its my site. but the heading is not the actual one. its getting from another article's data.
(i think can give you a sample search query, please don't take this as a spam)
Installing Go Language in Ubuntu+tutorboy - But this will list with proper title after a long title :(, I think now you understood what i am facing ... please help me to find out why this happens.
Edit:
How can i improve my SEO with wordpress?
When I search that query I don't get the page "Installing Go...", I get the "PHP header types" article, which has the above text on the page (links at the right). So the titles showing in Google are correct.
Google has obviously not crawled that page yet since it's quite new. Give it time, especially if your site is new and/or unpopular.
Couple of things I need to make clear:
Google crawled your site on 24 Nov 2009 12:01:01 GMT, so needless to say Google actually does not visit your site(blog)everyday.
When I queried the phrase you provided, the results are right. There are two url relates to your site. One is home page of your blog, another is the page that is (more closely)related to your query. The reason is the query phrase is directly related to the page of tutorboy.com/articles/php/use-php-functions-in-javascript.html, however, in your home page there are still some related keywords. That is the reason why Google presents two pages on the result page.
Your second question is hard to answer since it needs a complicated answer. Still, the following steps are crucial to your SEO.
Unique and good content. Content is king, and it is the subject that remains consistent in the whole time while another elements are changing with the evolving of search engine technology. Also keep your site content fresh.
Back links. Part of the reason that Google does not visit your site after your updating your site is your site lacks enough back links.
Good structure. Properly use those tags like<t>, <description>,<alt>etc.
Using web analysts tools like Google Analysts. It free, and you can see lot of things that you missed.
Most importantly, grabbing some SEO books or spending couple of minutes everyday to read some SEO articles.
Good Luck,