SEO to avoid possible duplicate content

Question

My website is about bands and musicians, but I have two problems with it:

1.) A musician can create a profile and add his bio. Bands can also create a profile and add band members and their bio. Many musicians are members of several bands, so I will have the bios of them repeated on several pages of my website.

Any idea how to control this since the site will be populated and controlled more or less by its users?

Here's an example:

A band has 10 members and will create a "band" profile. Lets say half of the band members will create their own profiles, while half don't care and will never do this, or they have it on some other website and won't bother doing it again on my website.

2.) If musicians will have bios on my website, there is also a (huge) possibility that they also have their own website with the same bio that will just be copy-pasted, or have the same bio on MySpace and similar websites, which will again result in duplicate content.

If I disable the option for users to add their bios, then the whole concept of the website doesn't make sense.

Answer 1

This issue you can fix by using canonical URL option,

First of all, the musician profile in your site is the proper content (or canonical parent).

The bands have the same musician profile this should be canonical to the musician actual profile like,

Suppose musician profile url is musician-1

then this musician will comes under bands like bands-profile-1

simply add a canonical url in bands-profile-1 like below.

<link href="http://sample.com/musician-1" rel="canonical" />

This will solve your duplicate profile issue in different bands and musician profile.

The next issue you pointed is the musician profile have a web site and should have same content keep in mind its not your site so its duplicate content will case by Search Engine Crawlers . So fixing this issue is try to avoid exact copy of that profile to your site just edit or make some difference in entire content .

This way can solve your duplicate content issue, without losing the concept of your website.

Answer 2

Obviously your website has been created without thinking about SEO but you can think about refactoring some functionalities to optimize it for SEO.

1) You can refactor your profile creation process; you can just propose to create of a profile per user. But you give the possibility to a user to create a band (or group) and add musicians to it (other existing profiles). The band (or group) page will have only links to profile pages of musicians. In that way, you avoid duplicate content issues because each musician manages his profile page and possibly band (or group) pages.

2) When a user create his bio, you can give him some hints like "please don't copy paste content from another website". You can also force the user to answer to questions you created to be sure having non duplicate content. If you want to be sure of non duplicate content, you can implement a duplicate content checker when the user saves his bio but a user could copy paste on another site the bio from your site in the future.

And think about merging from your system to the new one (301 redirect from old URLs to new ones...).

Answer 3

I've considered this for setting up community sites. My prefered setup today is to give everybody a subdomain which links back to the main domain. Thus the duplicate content is on that subdomain and not the main site.