Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
-
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search.
These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as:
Order to [City] today.
So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good.
However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose.
We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have:
- Italy Page (Unique Content)
- Rome (Duplicate Content)
- Milan (Duplicate Content)
- Venice (Duplicate Content)
- etc. (Duplicate Content)
For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop.
So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
- Italy Page (Unique Content)
-
Thanks for the reply! Hmm, do you mean to add further scripted content to bulk out the pages? We currently have a lot of dynamic (so, near-duplicate, but basically duplicate) content on all of those pages - Page Titles are unique - but the content is the same, just replacing the City name in each paragraph. That's the problem really, so I'm not sure additional dynamic content will fix that unless I've got the wrong end of the stick?
-
Thanks for the reply - ideally the route we'd take is to have all of them rewritten, but the cost to do that is too simply high for ~1200 pages.
Further investigation shows that only around 500 of the 1200 pages actually bring in traffic, so we could lose (redirect to country pages) 700 of the pages, and write content for 500 - that would reduce the cost, but would still be fairly substantial. Will have to think about that; as you say, adding properly optimised unique content is definitely the way to go, just whether we can justify the cost.
-
Is padding out the content on the duplicated pages an option?
ie: If you where to add additional information to those pages, and slightly re-word those pages (as opposed to completely re-writing them), this could be a step in the right direction.
What is actually being duplicated about the page?
- The content
- The page title
Because both of these should be able to be dynamically re-written.
Feel free to PM me some examples.
- Paul.
-
If you can't write them, get them written. Might as well be the best investment you make in SEO. You would be able to maintain and monopolize your position on the SERPs with 1200 pages of unique content, properly optimized and targeting long tail keywords. Since you mention, these pages are already ranking high and bringing in traffic, IMO you shouldn't try and get rid of them. I know this is not exactly the advise you are looking for but if you are serious about your SERPs then its definitely worth the while.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should cornerstone content have 3,500 words? Does Google discern words from the main text and from the references?
Is it true that cornerstone content should have at least 3,500 words? I've done some research and found that the recommended amount is between 2K-10k. Also, the content that we create/publish has a lot of references/citations at the end of each article. Does Google discern words from the main text and from the references? Meaning should I count references as part of the word count? Thanks for the help!
Content Development | | kvillalobos0 -
Ecommerce site content upgrade timescale.
I have been upgrading my sites content and structure and I have been wondering how long I should wait for a traffic increase before I should think it has been a failure and try a new plan of attack?
Content Development | | mark_baird0 -
Site Content Review Please!
I m looking for someone who can review my site and let me about quality of content on my site. Can anyone suggest / know who I can talk to about this ? Nick
Content Development | | orion680 -
Nearely identical content
Hi Everybody, I'm just checking the warnings from Seomoz an realized that on our site there are a lot of duplicate page content problems. In fact some of them are not really duplicated content because there are subtle differencies ie. colour or pack of products: http://www.szepsegbolt.hu/termekek/david_beckham_intimately_yours_for_man_eau_de_toilette_30_ml.html http://www.szepsegbolt.hu/termekek/david_beckham_intimately_yours_for_man_eau_de_toilette_50_ml.html What do you suggest, ignore this warning or change something on the site? Thank you in advance Balint
Content Development | | SanomaMediaseo0 -
Syndicating content with rel=author tag in it
If I have an article with my rel=author tag attached to it, and then I syndicate that article to another web site, should I keep the rel=author tag in that synbdicated article? Basically, what I'm worried about is that there will be 2 duplicate articles with my author tag on 2 different web sites. (I intend to put a canonical tag in the syndicated article so there is no duplicate content penalty) What is the best practice for this?
Content Development | | greggseo0 -
If we use content copied from another site ( assuming we have not plagerized), does it hurt our Google Rankings?
We have permission from another company to copy their content and use it on our site. This happens when we are describing a manufacturer's product and we copy pages from their site and add these pages to our site in order to describe the product we are selling. Is this considered duplicate content? Can this practice hurt us?
Content Development | | huskers0 -
How does google react to duplicate shops on ecommerce sites
Surely shopping cart sites are going to have a lot of duplicate content? Does google recognise this? Is there anything I can do let google know?
Content Development | | borderbound0 -
Why is this store getting hurt in SERPs when they removed duplicate content?
I work with an e-commerce client who got hit hard by Panda. They are very cautious, and want small-scale tests to prove each hypothesis before committing to larger changes. Recently, we reworked content on 30 product detail pages. Before, these product pages featured some original content mixed with some manufacturer content. The change we made was to remove the manufacturer content completely from the product page, leaving about 300 words of high-quality, original content--all of which was written by subject matter experts. I assumed that Google viewed this manufacturer text as duplicate content. However, when these 30 modified pages were compared to the control, they performed significantly worse. Question 1: Does any have any idea why these pages would perform worse than the control?
Content Development | | merch_zzounds
Question 2: Do you have any tips for convincing this client to try another test or get the buy-in to make the larger changes that--in theory--need to happen? FWIW, this client has about 10,000 product detail pages--the vast majority of which contain just manufacturer content. I appreciate your thoughts.0