I am currently running a contest where people submit reviews of their favorite programs. It is going very well and I will post an update later, but right now I have a question about duplicate content.

I have 2 people who want to submit reviews that they have already posted on their blog. It amounts to about 10 reviews out of 340. I would like to include them, but I am wondering how bad it will hurt my site.

Would it just discount the page that the duplicate review is on, or would it hurt my site in general? Any feedback as to whether or not I should include them?

Carletta

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I would say that two in that many reviews is not going to hurt your website

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I agree,
I agree

There is nothing wrong
There is nothing wrong

with duplicate content.
with duplicate content.

You don't have anything against twins do you??
You don't have anything against twins do you??

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Hi jazzy. I think it wouldn't hurt as well. Maybe you could add a small disclaimer mentioning that the original content was featured on such and such a blog...that way it doesn't look like you copied it for the sake of adding content. Good luck and all the best.

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I don't know how the reviews are being posted (or how long they are, which would determine that), but if they are on separate pages you can just restrict those pages from being indexed by search engines to preclude any problem.

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Douglas County Master Gardeners
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Oh, good idea. How would I do that? I am using block builder from SBI.

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It is very easy. There are multiple methods. Two of them are the use of the robots.txt and the no follow meta tag. Some use htaccess files.

While I have used the robots.txt exclusively because I have used it to exclude an entire domain, the meta tag is the easiest for excluding individual pages.

There is an article you could check out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex (Wikipedia). You simply put this in your header on each page you do not want to be indexed by google or others with their robots:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

There are some articles around saying that this method is not always effective but google says they still follow it as do major search engines. So for your concern, I think you are not thinking about spam robot searches for email addresses, etc., so this would be quick, easy, and meet your need.

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Douglas County Master Gardeners
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Here is a useful post from Google's blog about the duplicate content myths:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...t-penalty.html

Carletta,

Nora's post is a great help. Google's blog starts off leaving a feeling that it is all nothing to worry about but then by the end tends to leave a slightly different impression. However, in your case Carletta, it seems to give you good reason to use this material without any worry.

What Google says is that they wouldn't degrade your rankings in any way. What they do, though, is group duplicate material and choose one to display. They try to show the original first, using an example of Amazon material. If several sites show the same page with no new material they would show Amazon (if they identify them as the original) and none of the others in order to offer a variety of material on their page. Makes sense. Who would want to go through hundreds of pages of duplicate copies of an Amazon book description before finding anything else on a given topic.

So in your case, Carletta, you would be well advised to not hide these pages. They will do no harm. If anything, they will harm the original writer since anyone using search terms that otherwise might get them, could find you listed and not them. Besides, if you do have any significant other content on the same page they would probably both be listed.

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Douglas County Master Gardeners
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Awesome! Thanks guys!!!

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