Hello, I'm here, Meg Casebolt. I am the CEO of Love at First Search, which is an SEO strategy agency. This video is all about duplicate content between your existing website and your MemberVault marketplace or website. This is especially relevant for those of you that maybe have a sales page on your website. And then you have delivered some sort of product or course, in your MemberVault. And also for those of you who are thinking about using the Page Builder functionality, you want to move your blog posts over figuring out what lives on which sites that way you don't have any complications around duplicate content. Alright, so before I talk about how to prevent duplicate content, or what to do about it, let me first define what duplicate content is. When we talk about duplicate content, we're talking about words that are the same or very similar, that appear on multiple URLs throughout the internet. So duplicate content can even happen on your own website if it's set up incorrectly. So like, if you were to have a blog post in two different categories, it could technically be considered duplicate content, even though it's the same thing if we don't set up those categories correctly. The problem with duplicate content is that Google and other search engines don't know what the best piece of information is. So if it shows up in multiple places across the internet, Google might either be like, I don't know which one of these is best, pick one and ignore the rest. Or it might say, I'm just going to ignore the duplicate content and send traffic instead to someplace that's a more relevant answer to whatever the search is that people are looking for. So sorry, here we go. So duplicate content is not necessarily something that causes a penalty in Google, a lot of people think that if you have the same information in two different places, it's going to be penalized. They think that it will cause a plagiarism problem. That's not necessarily true, there was an estimate out there that like 25 to 30% of the internet is duplicate content, it's very common that people have the same information in multiple places, that is totally okay. But if you do have the same information in multiple places, you need to have a strategy around it. So if you currently we're going to talk about like blogs first. And then we'll talk about the option of sales pages and products. So if you are in the process, or thinking about moving your homepage, your about page, your blog posts, from an existing website over to your MemberVault site and turning that into your primary site. While you're in the process of moving those things, it might look like you're plagiarizing yourself. So if you're thinking about moving everything from your existing site over to your MemberVault, you need to have a strategy for this. Instead of going, Oh, I think I'll just move this one this day. And I'll have them both listed in both places. Probably the place where it appeared first is going to be the place that that Google believes is the original source of the content. So you have a couple of options here, you can move the blog post, let's say it's like a blog post, you can move the blog post from your existing website over to your MemberVault site, and then remove it from your WordPress site or your your existing website. You know, take it down and then set up what's called a redirect where you would say to Google Yep, it used to be here. Now it's here. It used to be on my website. Now it's in my MemberVault. And that will say to Google, if you were sending any traffic to this old part of my website, send it here instead to the new member one. That way, it'll still exist on your site, you know, you don't have to delete it entirely. You can if you want to. But the Google will start to the Google that Google will start to send traffic over to your MemberVault site and said, you can also I'll include a link about how to do this below. You can also set up what's called a canonical link, which is your way of saying to Google, yeah, I know that I have this information in both of these places. I am aware that this is duplicate content, I want you instead of looking at my website, I want you to go to my MemberVault. So you would put a canonical link, which is a specific type of code. You have to put in a specific way. I'm not going to explain that in this video. You would say yes, I know that these are here. Pay attention to this one. Send the traffic to this one. This is the one that matters. So you can have the duplicate content in multiple places and not feel like you have to move everything all at once. You also can write if you're like I'm going to move everything from my old website, put it on my MemberVault site, change the domain over make sure all those are redirects are in place, maybe that's part of your plan. If that's the case, I want you to watch the other video that I made about migration services, and how to migrate your website correctly. I do have a five part step, by step written by Google in that video. The other thing that I want to talk about a question that came up was, I'll just read you the question, if I have the main sales page for my products, on my WordPress website with a link to by going to my MemberVault product page, and that product page has the same copy for the product description, will Google penalize me for this not penalized. Google will not penalize you for the fact that you have the same information in both places, we absolutely want to make it clear to Google that these are linked, right. So it's not that you're plagiarizing yourself, it's that you are cross linking to yourself that you're allowing people to know both of these places. So on your sales page, you would link to your MemberVault, and then on your member, well, you would link back to your sales page and say, you know, to find out more about this, come over here. And that way, Google knows that you're not plagiarizing yourself, but you're just cross linking to yourself. And that will make it a little bit clearer to them that this isn't stolen content. This is duplicate content, duplicate content, again, not bad. It's just a little bit confusing about which one of them Google wants to send people to. So I mean, it's also possible that you rank twice for that term it like if it has your sales page and your member vault right underneath it. Like, that's not the worst thing to show up twice in the same search results. It's not likely because the contents the same, maybe you want to change the content up a little bit, I would say less than 30% to be the same if you want to rank not have this be a problem. But here's some things to think about. Here's what I want you to think about in terms of this strategy of having a sales page and a product that have the same content. Okay, ask yourself, Which place do I want people to find? Maybe you have like a really kick ass sales page, and you just want to use MemberVault for delivery. Okay, cool. You can make the product invisible. So it's still able to be purchased, but it's invisible, and you don't have people going to find it. It won't show up in those search results. But they can still access you can they can still buy it right? Maybe now. Yeah. It's not on your public page. But people can still access that information. So thinking about what you want to put publicly in your marketplace, if you do want to have it publicly in your marketplace. And you still want to have most of those details on your website. Cool. just shorten your MemberVault product listing. So you can have all the details on your website, and then have sort of a synopsis on your MemberVault marketplace. And then make sure to link back again, you know, maybe use that Learn More button to have people be able to go back to the sales page, and then let them buy. So using both of those buttons, we'll learn learn more and the Buy Now button. And that way Google understands that the two products are related. But you don't have to put everything that there is to know about the product in the product listing, you can shorten it and not have to worry about this duplicate content problem. Or maybe you just want to have everything live on your memorable. Cool. Do you really need to have the product page on your website? Or could you just send people who are curious about it to your memorable products, and then they can get the information right there on your product page. And then you don't have to worry about multiple sites and duplicate content and who's tracking what like every time you mentioned the product instead of sending them to a sales page, maybe just send them directly to your marketplace? Or in the same way I was talking about canonical links for your content, you could do the same thing for your product, where you could put the canonical link in your MemberVault and say, No, actually, I want you to direct all the traffic to the sales page. Right? So there are a lot of different ways to make this process work for you. But I think the biggest thing to think about yours that like duplicating content, not as scary as everyone thinks it is. It's not like, oh, I stole from myself. And then Google's never gonna send me any traffic ever again. No, Google is pretty good at figuring out what's related to each other and why we duplicate things in multiple places, and you aren't actually going to get a penalty for for duplicate content, it might just be a confusion, you get a little less traffic for it. So no reason to panic if you have duplicate content. But those are some of the things you can do. You can set up canonical links. You can no index pages on your site. So that way, they're still on your site, but Google will not send traffic to them. You can
set up those setup ways that people can just direct back and forth and cross link between them. There's a lot of different ways to approach this problem. So don't worry about duplicate content. Come up with a plan and if you have questions about actually moving your website then I want you to watch the other video about migrations
