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Can duplicate content still rank well?
Posted by on January 11, 2023 at 1:36 pmI’m thinking about a new project which will be a news website with a specific industry focus. The plan is to aggregate blogs from others in the industry into one place so there can be a central place for industry news. The bloggers would agree to participate and their full blog posts would be republished along with a link to the original post on the author’s website.
Since the posts are taken verbatim from other sites, will this make it impossible to rank my pages well in search engines? I researched this a bit and it wasn’t clear. I saw that while there’s no “penalty,” Google may simply ignore those pages (which is like a penalty). At the same time, large news websites are always republishing press releases.
Is there a good way to do this? Is this whole thing a bad idea?
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1 Reply
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Yea it’s possible but it’s not a good idea as duplicate content is harder to rank, especially if your just aggregating content which means you have nothing original, but lots of sites do this and they seem to do fine
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Odds are stacked against you in this. Google specifically made efforts to discredit duplicate content. Last two spam updates had huge impact. Why would google rank your page for that news than ranking original news? Large news websites republish press releases and still rank well because they also bring fresh new content in the form of news. They are seen as first source of current affairs. They are seen as information authority by google. I don’t think any site that purely republishes press releases, will have good ranking. There might be few exceptions but they are not the rule.
That does not mean, you can’t rank at all. If you are sharing scarce content or users start coming to you first as a source, your site might be ranked well.
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Goto the source of the press releases and then chatGPT them. Run through that other AI rewrite tool and away you go. Takes more effort but won’t be exactly duplicate.
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That’s a good question, if any one can answer mine as well. We are in the video game industry obviously descriptions are provided by the manufacturer how do we resolve this as of the games are printed for three or four different platforms?
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What’s the aim of the site? How are you planning or are you planning to monetize?
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It’s probably a moot point as I don’t think you’ll find publishers willing to give you their content in exchange for a link on a site that gets zero traffic and has zero credibility with Google, and likely won’t ever get any since it’s nothing but copied content.
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Sometimes duplicated content ranks, but usually on authorative sites. But if your site it’s new, i think you will have to balance the duplicated content with original. If 90% of your site it’s duplicated probably won’t work.
If it’s it 50% maybe your chance are higher.
It think you are gambling here. Probably the original author of the content won’t be too happy to to see their content copied.
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I recently saw several SEO influencers on Twitter discussing the possibility of being in the top 10 pages with the same content but different titles. Opinions were divided, but a screenshot with the first three positions of the search results in which there was the same paragraph ended the discussion.
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Simple No.
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I think you must totally add things to your plan. It’s such a good idea to make a central for news, blogs, etc., but you gotta put things on it. News is just news. Ofc, google would rank and index the source first, and there are many main/authoritative news channels all over the place. it wouldn’t give you anything, especially with the effects of 2 big updates on the spam brain/spam politics of google.
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If I were you, I’d play a little with my website’s aim and niche. Discuss the news, and blog topics, and put something new out for everyone. Make your ideas and thoughts come first in the content and you still can provide a central for people. But be original and put plus in them.
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Republishing content from other websites can be a tricky proposition when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While it’s true that Google does not penalize websites for republishing content, it also may not give much weight to such content in its search results. This is because Google’s algorithm is designed to prioritize original content and de-prioritize duplicate content.
However, this does not mean that it is impossible to rank well in search engines with a news website that aggregates content from other sites. There are a few things you can do to improve your chances:
Make sure to always include a link back to the original source of the content. This will give credit to the original author and also help to establish your site as a reputable source of industry news.
Use rel=”canonical” tag to indicate to the search engine that the original source of the content is the primary source.
Add your own original content, such as analysis, commentary, or interviews, to supplement the aggregated content. This will help to make your site stand out and also give Google more reasons to rank your pages well.
Use structured data (schema.org) to help search engines understand the content on your website, including the authorship and the publication dates.
It is also important to keep in mind that it is essential to obtain permission from the authors of the blogs before republishing their content. Even if the content is already publicly available, it is still considered to be copyrighted material, and reproducing it without permission could open you up to legal liability.
While republishing content from other sources can be a bit more challenging than creating original content, it’s definitely not impossible to make it work with the right approach. As long as you’re transparent about where the content comes from, give credit to the original authors, and supplement it with your own original content, you should be able to establish your site as a reputable and valuable source of industry news.
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Tech meme is an older and well-respected aggregation site for tech, so it would be a good model (and provide some answers). As an aggregator, it doesn’t get a lot of search traffic; the majority of its traffic comes from social, RSS, Redit, and enterprise surfacing tools like Newzdash or Trisolute.
Google lists it’s requirements for News, but it switched from a manual to automated approval process in 2019. The change has essentially blocked out nearly every new publication, large and small, from getting on GN.
AMP isn’t required. Most publishers stopped using AMP last year and the rest are improving CWV enough to shut it down in the near future.
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