SEO experts assemble – hosting ‘duplicate’ content

I have a pretty niche industry website (no, not like that, this is for work) with a very strong presence, audience and ranking.

We have a range of current and older government documents for Regulations and Guidance which we are considering hosting in one place – our website. Some are historic documents, but are needed for context of a project I am working on by both politicians and journalists, some public.

At present the Regulations and Guidance are both hard to find and on ‘odd’ websites such as research, legislation or foreign country sites, rather than the industry and UK specific website which is ours. The documents are also split across all 4 home nations of the UK, making searching even harder. To have a specific page with the information (all PDF’s) to download from one place seems sensible and useful for our campaign.

BUT, my website person is concerned about duplicate information and SEO. My reading is that Google (other search engines are available) only has an ‘issue’ with duplicate content on one website. There is not issue with ‘competing’ to share the same information as a PDF hosted on our site. My web persons view is that we link to the multiple different websites, from our own.

So – duplicate content and dunny do it or yeah, go for it and build page authority to become ‘the’ place to find this information?

So – duplicate content and dunny do it or yeah, go for it and build page authority to become ‘the’ place to find this information?

Both will work.  SEO only really matters if you want people to find you organically and if you are having a ‘campaign’ then you are likely driving people to your site.  Personally I would duplicate the content to make life as simple as possible.  If Google sees people landing on your site and then leaving pretty quickly to go and find the info. on another site they may decide your site isn’t authoritative enough so hosting it might be the best idea

Tell Google not to index the content, if you only want to refer people to it who’re already aware of your site. If you want to use content copied from elsewhere to pull people to your site from organic searches… well… don’t do that… it won’t work long term, and will devalue the content you do generate yourself as far as Google is concerned.

I’d make the website as user friendly and useful as possible, and then noindex etc any content that you perceive as duplicate.

That’s a good summary of where I’m at @joeyr.