Google has come up with helpful points on how to tackle internal and 3rd party duplicate content issues. Since a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent, Google has strong technology in place to trace back the source of the original content. The correct identification of the original content source saves webmaster’s the trouble of having negative effects for their site.
Google sees the content source in two ways as below:
- Internal - Content pages that has same or almost indentical content that appears within the same website.
- External - Content that appears in the 3rd party websites either with permission or without.
Whenever you engage in content syndication services such as articles, press releases, and so on., ensure that the syndication partners link back to the original website.
There has been incidents where the scraped content ranks higher than the original content. In those case, Google recommends following advice:
- Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
- You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
- Include the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file.
- Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.
A detailed post is available at Google Webmaster Central
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