Plugin is creating duplicate content

Hello @grandjil,

I hope you don’t mind me responding in English, as this will allow the rest of the community to read along as well.

We’ve written an article concerning duplicate content in legal texts and documents, and why this (also according to Google) is not an issue. Please find the article attached here: https://complianz.io/are-legal-pages-considered-duplicate-content

In the case that this still does not fully reassure you about duplicate content in legal texts, you do still have the possibility to adjust/change our default legal texts as desired, as the reason behind the ‘duplicate content’ is that these same texts are used on many other websites as well.

I just wanted to quickly note that we use the plugin and texts on all of our own websites as well, and we have never received any penalties concerning the use of duplicate content.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Jarno

Hi Jarno,

no problem i will reply in English.

This problem is not connected to the legal pages, this problem appears on every page on the websites.

i just checked your site: https://complianz.io/are-legal-pages-considered-duplicate-content and there the problem doesn’t exist…

When you check the code of the page it will show this:

<div class="cmplz-description">
						<span class="cmplz-description-preferences">De technische opslag of toegang is noodzakelijk voor het legitieme doel voorkeuren op te slaan die niet door de abonnee of gebruiker zijn aangevraagd.</span>
					</div>
				</details>

				<details class="cmplz-category cmplz-statistics" >
					<summary>
						<div class="cmplz-category-header">
							<div class="cmplz-category-title">Statistieken</div>
							<div class="cmplz-banner-checkbox">
								<input type="checkbox"
									   id="cmplz-statistics-optin"
									   data-category="cmplz_statistics"
									   class="cmplz-consent-checkbox cmplz-statistics"
									   size="40"
									   value="1"/>
								<label class="cmplz-label" for="cmplz-statistics-optin" tabindex="0"><span>Statistieken</span></label>
							</div>
							<div class="cmplz-icon cmplz-open"></div>
						</div>
					</summary>
					<div class="cmplz-description">
						<span class="cmplz-description-statistics">De technische opslag of toegang die uitsluitend voor statistische doeleinden wordt gebruikt.</span>
						<span class="cmplz-description-statistics-anonymous">De technische opslag of toegang die uitsluitend wordt gebruikt voor anonieme statistische doeleinden. Zonder dagvaarding, vrijwillige naleving door uw Internet Service Provider, of aanvullende gegevens van een derde partij, kan informatie die alleen voor dit doel wordt opgeslagen of opgehaald gewoonlijk niet worden gebruikt om je te identificeren.</span>
					</div>

As you saw here: https://www.copyscape.com/?s=384734776375147 this content should not be visible for copyscape

I hope you can find the problem

Mike

extra info: we use the free version – maybe it’s not same as on your website https://complianz.io/are-legal-pages-considered-duplicate-content

Hallo Mike,

Thanks for your feedback, The article Jarno refers to is indeed about legal pages, but the main conclusion applies to the cookie banner as well:

Both Google and SEO specialists state that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

Specifically for the banner: we use the data-nosnippet=”true” to tell Google that the content should not be indexed:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag#data-nosnippet-attr

I think copyscape does not take the data-nosnippet into account. The plugin is used by us on our main websites, like really-simple-ssl.com, complianz.io and we have no issues with indexing by Google.

Based on our own experiences, the usage on about 300000 websites, and the information I can find about this by Google and other SEO specialists, I don’t think the issue you have is with duplicate content.

But if you have more information or suggestions on this, I’m happy to dive into that. We’re constantly improving the plugin based on countless user suggestions, and are always looking for new improvements.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Rogier Lankhorst.

Can you explain why the content is not showing in the source code on your sites?

view-source:https://complianz.io/are-legal-pages-considered-duplicate-content

This content: De technische opslag of toegang die uitsluitend wordt gebruikt voor anonieme statistische doeleinden. Zonder dagvaarding, vrijwillige naleving door uw Internet Service Provider, of aanvullende gegevens van een derde partij, kan informatie die alleen voor dit doel wordt opgeslagen of opgehaald gewoonlijk niet worden gebruikt om je te identificeren. 0. 0. De technische opslag of toegang is nodig

@grandjil I see it on row 1681 of the source, in a span with class ‘cmplz-description-statistics-anonymous’. Only it’s in English on our sites.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Rogier Lankhorst.

Okay, so what is the reason then that i don’t get any results at copyscape.com with your site but if i check many other sites i get a huge amount of results of duplicate content…

what is different on your site with many other sites?

The only thing i can think of is, that for your sites you created unique content for that part for each site.

That’s also the reason that you don’t have any issues with the rankings or getting de-indexed.

Sadly i can’t find anywhere in the plugin an option to change this content, so i need to have knowledge to change this in the source code, same as me many wordpress users don’t have this knowledge to change this in the source code and it should be available in the plugin settings.

We haven’t done anything special on our websites. It is a default configuration of Complianz. The text in the categories is the English default, which will be used on even more websites than any Dutch variant. Possibly copyscape cannot handle Dutch very well.

• You can edit this text in complianz/cookiebanner, then go to “Categories”.

Regarding the site in the report, when I do a search for this site, the banner content does not appear in the google snippets. So even though the content shows up in the copyscape report, Google understands it’s not an important part of the page. The way Google understands your website is the most important thing in my opinion.

Do you have maybe an environment (can be staging) where I can see your implementation?

What test do you run on copyscape specifically? The one on the homepage?

Then I’ll do some comparisons to see if I can find any obvious differences.

To my knowledge, the usage of data-nosnippet is the current best practice as suggested by Google to handle this kind of content.

To understand why copyscape handles these websites differently, I think we need copyscape support to tell us that. But possibly copyscape does not understand the data-nosnippet attribute, as the results suggest. If that should be the case, the results from copyscape would not reliable.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Rogier Lankhorst.