User Generated Content / Duplicate Content

hi guys,

how can i handle user generated content on my website to not get punished by a "duplicated content" penalty if a user posts a text which is copied from another website (e.g. if a forum member copies something)?

thanks for your feedback

That shouldn't be a problem imo. I've seen a lot of forums copy paste the content from other sites. But if you worry too much, just delete the posts.

No need to worry about duplicate content penalty, since it doesn't exist, there is only the risk of ranking lower than the original content, what you should be looking into though is how to handle dmca requests, and basicly have something in your TOS that revokes any and all content responsabillity from your site

really... so canonical tags are useless if i have the same page on my website available under 2 different URLS (but same domain)?

LoLLaR said:

really... so canonical tags are useless if i have the same page on my website available under 2 different URLS (but same domain)?

Click to expand...

Yes and no google willl always rank the post/article they belive is the most relevant, however if there is one of those that you want google to show instead of the other you should use the canonical tags or do a 301 whatever suits you best.
the use of canonical tags and/or internal 301 matters in seo simply becouse it shows google that you have your s**t together and knows what you are doing on the technical side of things, it isn't a huge ranking factor but it still is a ranking factor, and since it's an easy one for us we might as well take it.