Best Practices for Mirroring Content

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 08:26:38 -0500

@John Mueller Before Google took over the internet, we used to have this practice called mirroring, where the same information was stored on different websites so that the information was not lost if one server goes down. You would probably classify this as "duplicate content."

We are not mirroring the content for SEO purposes; we are archiving the content and making it available to our online community. Our online community does not need Google to browse our website, so we are not concerned about ranking for pages that are mirrored content.

What are the best practices for mirrored content? For example, should we put a canonical meta tag pointing to the original content? Or is there something else we should do?

seo

John Mueller

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:51:51 -0500

@scott I missed the memo about taking over the internet. Looking at the news, it seems someone else has taken over now. Win some, lose some. Anyway.

Mirrored content is something all search engines have to deal with. If you don't care which URL is picked, there's no need to do anything. If you do care, then use the link-rel-canonical. There's no penalty involved. No need to fear "duplicate content" (it is what it is, and that's fine).

Scott M. Stolz

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 10:48:09 -0500

@John Mueller Thank you for your response. :)

What about when you are mirroring "reprinted with permission" type content? That is what I was thinking when I posted the question.

For example, if someone created help documentation in GitHub, and with permission, we clean it up, reformat it, and post it in article form. They are attributed as the author, of course, and we link back to the GitHub version of the help documentation, and perhaps their website.

This looks exactly like a "guest post" (even though we receive no compensation) and is, by definition, "duplicate content."

Does you suggestion still apply for "reprinted with permission" type content?

John Mueller

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 11:33:49 -0500

@scott I wouldn't see that as mirroring. Search engines would usually rank the two content pieces individually (since they're unique, and variations of the same theme). The "hard" part is that if both appear, you can't decide which one will be ranked higher, so it can happen that your "copy" shows up first. If you do care about which one shows up, then you ideally have to block the others from being indexed.