Strategies for revising my duplicate content?
-
New to SEO and SEOmoz. I tried searching for this first and I'm sure it's on here but I could not find it.
I have a site that markets fishing charters in a few dozen cities. Up to now I was relying on PPC and using each city page as a landing page of sorts. Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people.
Site is www.vipfishingcharters.com
Thanks!
-
No because im guessing each page has a title tag specific to the location, if you merge 2 pages together your end up with one title tag rather then 2.
Persoanlly myself I would have a page which lists all the locations called locations.php then link to each city from that page, if you build a few links to the city page your might find the city pages get crawled more often.
So your have:
vipfishingcharters.com/locations/boca-raton-fishing-charters/
-
Wow thanks for all this feedback guys. Yes, I sensed that the best solution is write original content but it's true - there really are only a finite number of ways to explain what a sailfish is. I guess I can reword but how does Google's comparison engine work?
Assuming I could rewrite all the text, would it help to create separate file names for the images on each page (i am not going to have 40 different pictures of sailfish) - does this matter at all?
Searches for my site nearly always include a city name along with them so my original logic was to create a "landing page" for every city. Right now nearly 90% of my traffic is CPC but I'm trying to change that.
Would it make more sense to consolidate cities and group them on a smaller number of pages or does this then kill the localized search?
-
Hi Noah!
If there is to be a page for each location then there should be something useful to say about each location too.
Consider what would actually be useful to users specifically searching for the page about their area.
As well as the content about the activities you offer (which, as previous answerers have said, should be unique for each page and show you to be the 'fishing guy') I would suggest:
- Information about how to get to each location
- Local places to stay if people are to travel for the fishing activities
- Anything that makes that particular city unique/interesting in terms of the experience you offer
That type of information that is specific about each location will be unique to each landing page.
As previous answerers have also suggested, customer testimonials and other forms of user generated content would be great.
-
Nice... great idea. Get enthusiastic customers to share.. and send a photo if they caught a nice one. They will probably link to it from their facebook page if their photo is on a fishing boat with a monster fish.
-
Great suggestions, William.
If you want to be the "fishing guy" you have to earn it.
-
You could start with getting a customer testimonial, just have a page with location you fished, comment and collect them, each one will be unique, can be added to the beach they finished and added benefit 'installs trust in potential new business'.
Send the customer an email day after fishing trip with a link to the form.
That's just one way sure there is other ways.
-
First off, you have a very nice website as I am also an avid angler. I do agree with EGOL as you can build unique content for different cities, for one of my sites I promote the bass industry however I can target areas via lake location in different metros. Do you have only one launch point for your service or many? another thing you could do is partner with tackle shops within your target areas and the reference them in your article with the metro making that page include that location you are targeting.
Or you could develop a contest for the best fishing photo in that metro all in all there are many ideas on how you can get listed for these types of metro keywords related to your industry..
One person that you could learn form would be Wil Reynolds as he spoke about this stuff in one of his seminars http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hSQ0DZdSDMI#t=368s
You can also reference his last blog post on SEOMOZ
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/never-worry-about-an-algorithm-update-again-a-history
All very good stuff, and welcome to SEOMOZ there is a ton of experts in hear to help.
Hope this gave you some ideas and get your gears working.
-
Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people.
I am going to be straight and honest.
Write unique content for each city. Just do it.
(there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing)
I don't believe this... get to writing. If you want to be the "fishing guy" you should be able to do this no sweat. It just takes time.
I know you will not like my answer. But you know I am right.
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
-
Duplicated Content on Wordpress Mobile&Desktop versions- Is it bad for SEO?
Hello, I use a Wordpress theme for displaying mobile and desktop versions separately. The problem is that if you use tools like screaming frog or if you look at the code (view source), you can detect duplicated content. But if you're browsing on your mobile you will see only the content I have created for the mobile version and the same if you're looking at the desktop version, you will only see the desktop content.
On-Page Optimization | | AlphaRoadside
Is this creating an SEO problem? If it is, please let me know why and if it has a solution. Thanks in advance.0 -
Potential duplicate content issue?
We have a category on our website for PVC rolls to buy as standard 50m rolls (this includes 15 products in the category). We're also releasing PVC rolls to buy per metre (10m roll/25m roll etc...), again with 15 products, which we are adding as a separate category as it makes more sense for our customers and removes the risk of having too many options. Would using the same description be bad practice for SEO? The product is exactly the same just available in different roll sizes, but we definitely do not want to combine categories as it doesn't work for our customers. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RayflexGroup0 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
Is my blog simply duplicate content of my authors' profiles?
www.example.com/blog is the full list of blog posts by various writers. The list contains the title of each article and the first paragraph from the article. In addition to /blog being indexed, each author's contribution list is being indexed separately. It's not a profile, really, just a list of articles in the same title & paragraph format of the /blog page. So if /blog a list of 10 articles written by two writers, I have three pages: /blog/author1 is a list of 4 articles /blog/author2 is a list of 6 different articles /blog is a list of 10 articles (the 4+6 from the two writers) Is this going to be considered duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Brocberry0 -
E commerce Website canonical and duplicate content isssue
i have a ecomerce site , i am just wondering if any one could help me answer this the more info page can be access will google consider it as duplicate and if it does then how to best use the canonical tag http://domain.com/product-page http://domain.com/product-page/ http://domain.com/product-Page http://domain.com/product-Page/ also in zencart when link product it create duplicate page content how to tackle it? many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | conversiontactics0 -
Is rel=canonical used only for duplicate content
Can the rel-canonical be used to tell the search engines which page is "preferred" when there are similar pages? For instance, I have an internal page that Google is showing on the first page of the SERPs that I would prefer the home page be ranked for. Both the home and internal page have been optimized for the same keyword. What is interesting is that the internal page has very few backlinks compared to the home page but Google seems to favor it since the keyword is in the URL. I am afraid a 301 will drop us from the first page of the SERPs.
On-Page Optimization | | surveygizmo0 -
Can duplicate content issues be solved with a noindex robot metatag?
Hi all I have a number of duplicate content issues arising from a recent crawl diagnostics report. Would using a robots meta tag (like below) on the pages I don't necessarily mind not being indexed be an effective way to solve the problem? Thanks for any / all replies
On-Page Optimization | | joeprice0