Duplicate Content

Not to worry

Most people working with digital are aware about the importance of SEO value and unique content. However – unique content also takes effort; resources, time and money. ArrivalGuides solutions provides help for you to create an inspiring environment for your users to stay longer and act more on your site. But is content licensing the same thing as duplicate content? Short answer: No.

Better UX

The thing about duplicated content is that it is neither good nor bad for your SEO value. In other words, it can never damage the SEO value on your site nor can it add to your SEO value. But if you take good care of the destination content, and integrate it in a good way, you will create a better user experience for your clients. And the increased activity you get from this is good for your site.

More value

When your customers find your online environment interesting they stay longer, interact more, share links and so forth. All of these things help your SEO value. The longer average time spent on page you get, the more sessions, the more action, the better the SEO value and the higher you will be displayed on organic search results in Google.

Matched needs

When using ArrivalGuides Licensed travel content, your creative team use our raw data -in essence images and text- to support your own SEO. With our API you can block off what you don’t need and use what you do need, which can even give the content uniqueness. On top of this, you get content volume – fast.

Does Google penalize websites for duplicate content?

What is duplicate content? In Google’s own words: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

Google understands that a good portion of highly popular web pages on the internet are built on syndicated – or republished – content, e.g. embedded articles, news feeds, social media messages, etc. That’s why Google says: “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

How can the duplicated content issue be avoided if you want to use content from a content provider? Although it might sound obvious: follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and build websites for visitors, not for search engines – Google will understand the intentions. In short: using syndicated content on your site to provide an enhanced experience for your visitors won’t affect your SEO rankings, and it can be a good strategy to build a more engaged audience.

Backlinks and canonical tags don't help your SEO value – they help ours

Sometimes we get questions regarding backlinks and canonical tags and whether they help SEO. Adding these will help our SEO value but not yours. When we license our content we don’t demand our clients to add backlinks or canonical tags, but we won’t be sad if you do add them, as it helps us. Backlinks and canonical tags is a way to tell Google search engines that the original content came from our database. If you don’t display this, Google doesn’r care. Google will only recognize that the licensed content is duplicated and will not give you extra SEO value for it, but if the content makes your users stay longer on your site and act more the value will be recognized and give you a better SEO ranking.

As Neil Patel (well-known marketer and SEO expert) says: Canonical is really just a fancy (almost biblical) word that means ‘official version’. If you ever re-publish an article that first appeared elsewhere, you can use the canonical tag to tell search engines where the original version appeared. It looks like this:

Patel continuous: Googlebot visits most sites every day. If it finds a copied version of something a week later on another site, it knows where the original appeared. Googlebot doesn’t get angry and penalize. It moves on. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

Canonical tags and links can be useful if you website has two pages that holds the same content. It will help google understand which one your prefer as “master page”. It can for example be if you have one page for mobile and one for desktop, both of them holding the same content.