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Are Copied Privacy Policy and Disclaimers Duplicate Content?
lowe300
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Joined: 01 Nov 13
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09 Jan 14 11:00 pm

Are Copied Privacy Policy and Disclaimers Duplicate Content?

Can anyone tell me if using a copied privacy policy or disclaimer will hurt a new website's rankings? I have a couple from websites that generate them for free and I'm trying to decide if I want to use them or not.
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tankctrlr
Posts: 210
Joined: 16 Oct 09
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10 Jan 14 4:47 am

 Are you talking about duplicate content? You can just tell search engines to not index those pages and 'nofollow' any links to them, like footer links etc., etc.
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cecille.l
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Joined: 25 Feb 11
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10 Jan 14 5:17 am

 Hi Lowe,

Privacy pages and disclaimers copied off the internet are technically duplicate content since there are several others exactly like it online. The best way to avoid this is to re-write the privacy and disclaimer page so that it fits your niche, and is not a "general" page.

You also need to make sure to add them to your robots.txt file so search engines won't index them.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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joelpalarca21
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Joined: 18 Feb 13
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12 Jan 14 12:42 am

 Legal pages will not gonna affect you a big issue, unless you will not put keyword stuffing.
Google will understand every website needs legal pages.like terms and conditions, declaimer, privacy. .

Hope it helps :)
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eric.burton.miller
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12 Jan 14 1:11 am

 Somebody, anybody help me please. I can no longer access my website: http://www.bestfriendagain.net. I am getting a 504 Gateway Time-out error message. I have been working on it through Affilo Jet Pack, but I can't get any answers to this problem. Tried google, everything there says it is a server issue. I am using ns1.doubledotmedia.com and ns2.doubledotmedia.com as my name servers.
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joelpalarca21
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12 Jan 14 1:15 am

 Your website is working http://www.bestfriendagain.net/.

"Welcome to Best Friend Again

Welcome to Best Friend Again, feel free to check out some the great content and resources I have on this topic.

Dog Obedience Training"
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eric.burton.miller
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Joined: 05 Jan 14
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12 Jan 14 1:32 am

 Wow, did you just fix it, or did it just happen on it's own? Either way, thank you for at least looking into it.
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Site Admin
aletta
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12 Jan 14 9:56 pm

 Back to the dupe content question... ;)

If a page is duplicate content, it just means that Google will choose only one version of the page to show in the search engine results -- and that probably won't be yours. Is this a big problem? Depends on whether you desperately want your privacy policy and disclaimer pages to reach the top of the search engines.

I'm guessing it's not a top priority :)

You can of course disallow indexing through robots.txt, but I don't think it's really necessary. It doesn't affect the rest of your site.
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uktallraj
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Joined: 28 May 12
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03 Apr 14 7:35 am

 Hi! Aletta,

I'm not too clued up,
but I was unde the impression that if one page is viewed poorly by google
the entire website is affected.
Please tell me that I am wrong.

http://www.therelationshipsaviour.com
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Site Admin
aletta
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Joined: 09 Jul 06
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03 Apr 14 9:15 pm

 Google's Matt Cutts says it isn't a problem.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/23 ... r-Rankings

It's not that Google goes "OMG DUPLICATE CONTENT, KILL THE PAGE, KILL THE SITE, KILL EVERYTHING!". It just says "hey, that content is duplicate, we won't show this particular piece of content to searchers".

It's not that your page is viewed "poorly". It's just that this one particular page won't rank. (And you probably don't care, because it's a privacy policy.)

So long as the majority of your site is pretty normal, that'll be as far as the consequences go.
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Are your changes not showing up on your website? Try doing a hard refresh! http://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/cache/
 
uktallraj
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03 Apr 14 10:54 pm

 Thank you, Aletta, and thanks for the link to Matt Cutts.
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mark schaaf
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22 May 14 4:26 pm

 there are so many privacy policies on the internet that I can't see many of them being a lot different, at the same time who cares if it is duplicated or not, are you trying to get someone to read that page or a page of information or a sales page, that is where Google doesn't what duplicated information. you can also put in a bot not letting the search engines scan the page and they will never know what is on it.
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Mark
 

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