Duplicate content - blog

[Laurie Swezey]

Hi Everyone,

I want to duplicate my Ning blog on my main website, however I do not want to be penalized by Google.   I want the blog on my main site to help with SEO (not the Ning site)

Is there a way to remove my entire Ning site from google, or any other way to create duplicate content without being penalized by Google?

[doone]

A good question and one I also worry about as I have similar info on wordpress, blogspot and ning. I found this link http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer... which helped me a bit,  hopefully one of the NC SEO experts here will chime in with a better answer for you.

[Allison Leahy]

Hi Laurie, You can edit the robots.txt files to prevent search engines to crawl those specific pages of your network. It might look something like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /profiles/blogs/

Disallow: /profiles/blog/

Head to My Network > Tools > Search Bots > paste in the text above > click "Save" > wait for Google to reindex those pages.

RobotsText.org and Google Webmaster have good info about blocking or removing pages using robots.txt files.

Basically, the value of the Disallow field specifies a partial URL that is not to be visited. It can be a full path, or a partial path and any URL that starts with that value will not be retrieved. For example,

Disallow: /help disallows both /help.html and /help/index.html, whereas Disallow: /help/ would disallow /help/index.html but allow /help.html.

I'm not an expert in search or application of the robots.txt, but wanted to offer up an example of something I think should work given your intention. I'm sure you'll get more good advice in the days to come.

[Laurie Swezey]

thanks, this was great advice!