How B2Bs can Improve SEO by Avoiding Duplicate Content

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How B2Bs can Improve SEO by Avoiding Duplicate Content

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Maria Pergolino | August 18, 2009

Last week I attended Search Engine Strategies in San Jose and joined in on a session about Duplicate Content. This session was very interesting, but since it was not part of their B2B track, was not focused specifically on how it affects B2B marketers.

Duplicate content occurs when two or more web pages have the same content. This happens frequently for B2C companies, as many companies may be selling the same product with similar product descriptions on different websites. While B2B companies may not be selling products on consumer sites, we still have to deal with the potential problems caused by content duplication.

B2B duplicate content issues can arise when:

Multiple sites publish your press release
Partners use your product or service descriptions
Your blog content is posted to multiple websites
Multiple URLs on your domain point to the same content
You pay industry or news sites to host your content (content syndication)

As you see, these are common results of B2B marketing, so understanding the affects of and how to deal with duplicate content is very important.

First, let’s dispel the myth that Google punishes your site for duplicate content. Google has said that they do not penalize for duplicate content, but instead can cause your page to be omitted from results because it appears to be the same as another. Why does Google do this? This is to avoid someone from doing a search and just coming up with the same page (but with different URL) over and over again in the results. Duplicate content may sound like something that doesn't happen often, but Yahoo said at Search Engine Strategies that over 1/3 of the web is duplicate.

When Google omits results, you will see something similar to this at the bottom of the results. If it’s your page that is omitted, instead of those copying your content, your page will likely not be found.

Another problem with duplicate content, especially if the duplications are on your website is dilution of your page strength as the value of links for the same content may be spread across multiple pages. Google does its best to figure out which pages are duplicates, but if they can’t, this may hurt your site's SEO.

So what are the best ways to deal with this duplicate content?

Submit a site map so Google knows what you think is important on your site
Use canonical tags to avoid content concerns within your domain
Make sure you are providing unique content descriptions when doing content syndication programs
Make sure press releases are listed on your site before they are submitted for distribution
If you use channel partners make sure you put unique content for each of them on your pages, instead of just duplicating the descriptions and change the name and contact information
Ensure your press and product pages have unique information that is not being used by partners

Include additional unique information on your press release pages
Make sure your product pages are unique and do not submit them for use by partners
Provide partners with basic content, but ask them to add information about how the partnership is relevant to your product or service on their pages

By doing this you will ensure that your content receives its full link value, can be found, and is listed before content syndicators, press companies, and partners.

Did you miss Search Engine Strategies but wish you could have attended? I’m giving one commenter to this post my conference tote bag, Google laser pointer, Bing pen, three sponsor t-shirts, search engine strategies notebook, and any other fun stuff from this great event. Let me know some of your B2B SEO concerns, why you wish you attended, or just say hi. We’ll randomly pick a commenter and mail them this package of fun stuff from the event next week.

http://www.leadsloth.com Jep Castelein

Hi Maria, you mention “dilution of your page strength”. I think I know what you mean with that, but I’m not sure: let me give an example and see if that’s the same issue.
On my blog I have category pages, tag-based pages and author pages that all contain the same posts as the main blog. So lots of duplicate content. I’m using no-follow tags to avoid crawling of these pages by the search engines, so they will show only the article pages themselves, giving those pages extra “strength”.
Is this a scenario that you were thinking of?
BTW: I’m using a WordPress plugin called “Robots Meta” that makes it easy to set up no-follow links
http://www.marketo.com Maria Pergolino

Hey Jep,
Many companies, especially enterprise B2B companies, will have pages duplicated throughout their site, making sure that a prospect can find everything they need, without having to hunt around in different parts of the site. Google does it’s best to match these pages up, realizing they are the same, but 1. may not know which is the primary link and 2. may not realize it is the same content. If people are linking to these different pages and Google doesn’t realize they are the same, they link juice is spread out, diluting the value between the different pages. The goal is that one page gets all the value so it ranks higher.
http://blog.collaboratemd.com jenni smith

I’m an avid search engine optimizer, but have not really heard much about duplicate content before. This was an EXCELLENT post. The tips (especially, for me, the note about posting PRs on your own site before they hit the wire) were useful, relevant, and much appreciated.
http://www.right90.com Gordon Yu

Maria,
As you mention that many companies, and Yahoo says 1/3 of the internet as well, has dup pages on their websites, I would want to know how to ensure that a specific page receives the higher rank value? Especially on websites with existing duplicate content, how would you go about to guarantee a new, or existing page, is what Google (or any other crawler) deems as higher value? As product descriptions or similar content is scattered throughout the website to detail the different product and service offerings a company has, it will run into the issue of “spreading out” too much. Alternatively, if a website does not add similar/dup content across different pages, it may not give the visitor sufficient information of the product. So I presume, content itself is like a double-edged sword: too little or too much may not necessarily be beneficial. In addition, I was curious if duplicate content also referred to repeated keywords or repeat hyperlinked text within a webpage to increase PageRank. Would these also be considered duplicate content on a particular site?
Travis Fisher

Hi Maria.
I am particularly interested in B2B SEO for local search. A lot of vendors don’t care if a web user a thousand miles away see their content – they are more interested in people looking for products or services within a limited geographic scope. Do you have any advice or best practices to share?
http://blog.right90.com Eric

Couldn’t a lot of this be solved with the way the site map is architected? Then, use nofollows to link back to the single page that contains the information?
If your stuff is getting syndicated, then also make sure you’re back linking to your keywords in the content you know will be getting published elsewhere.
Right?
http://www.timmooneyphotography.com Tim Mooney

I wish I was at the Search Engine Strategies Conference. In a competitive market its great to see opportunities all in the same ‘fish bowl’ all at once. Whilst the net provides us with selective choice of what we want …. conference and trade show opportunities show us what we dont know we want.
Tim
http://www.joelkline.com JoelKline

Hi Maria,
I am interested in two areas of this post. First, we have been taught to duplicate some kinds of information (with slight variation) to show company focus on a certain industry. How do we still do this? Second, I am interested in how B2B SEO affects international search engines. One of my B2B clients sells all over the world and has reps in China, India, etc. Google Analytics says visitors to the corporate page are coming from these countries, but other than landing pages, how do we optimize? We don’t have the time or budget for a country-by country strategy.
Cheers,
Joel Kline
http://www.green-leads.com/?marketo Michael Damphousse, Green Leads

Press Releases. Never thought of that one before. So basically, sites that “pick up” your content is good for immediate buzz, but not for long term SEO? Not good. Can you elaborate on your two bullet points regarding press releases?
Great article!
http://www.aidandtrade.com Sara Martin

Whether Google doesn’t penalize a duplicate content but I have firm believe that it may affect a site. Personally I appreciate matt cutts because he has elaborated how to avoid duplicate content by using canonical tags. I have never heard this before but it sounds very interesting and useful. But I have got no answer when it comes to B2C/B2B sites whom products, descriptions and somewhere keywords are same.
http://www.wealthnetpartners.com/ Marc

What is a page being omitted from search results, if not a penalty? That’s one of the definitions of a penalty, if you ask me. Best to avoid duplicate content at all costs.
http://www.b2bwebstrategy.com/duplicate-content-bad-but-not-the-worst-content-related-sin.htm B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine » Duplicate content: bad, but not the worst content-related sin

[...] her excellent post for Marketo’s Modern B2B Marketing blog, Maria Pergolino provides several tips for avoiding [...]
http://www.emagineusa.com/blog/duplicate-content-bad-but-not-the-worst-content-related-sin.htm B2B Web Strategy » Duplicate content: bad, but not the worst content-related sin

[...] her excellent post for Marketo’s Modern B2B Marketing blog, Maria Pergolino provides several tips for avoiding [...]