Ask Yoast: RSS importers and duplicate content

At Yoast we’re happy to help you with your SEO question! This time we received a question from Diana. She’s asking:

“Does Google consider it to be duplicate content when I import my articles from one blog to my main blog using an RSS Importer? Will I be penalized by Google in some way?”

Watch the answer in this video or find it in the transcript below!

Transcript

Well you won’t necessarily be penalized, but Google will only show one of the two sites that have the blog articles. Your best bet probably, is to choose either one of them, and to make sure that the canonical on the one that you don’t want to rank is set to the one that you do want to rank. This might be slightly technical, but it’s in the Advanced tab of Yoast SEO. Underneath each post you can set the canonical to point to another url than the url of the post. And by doing that you’ll tell Google which one you want to rank. This solves any duplicate content issues. And you should be able to get your RSS importer to do that for you. Good luck!

Read more: ‘RSS feeds in the age of Panda and Penguin’ »

In the series Ask Yoast we help you with your SEO query. Don’t hesitate and send your SEO question to ask@yoast.com!