Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
-
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is.
I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation.
e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City]
I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
-
Just thought I would update the results on this.
After taking PoolGuy's advice I 301'd the duplicate pages to their main pages, i.e.
[Black Widget in City] ->301-> [Widget in City]
Now almost every single main page has moved up on average 12 places to #1 on google!
The duplicate pages are still showing in the SERPs but appear to be dropping and I guess will eventually dissapear.
So I'm now a staunch promoter of dealing with duplicate content!
-
I would predict you will continue to rank well for your duplicate pages. I further predict they (because of Panda) will bring down the rankings of the rest of your site. If you can add some good unique content to 50 different colors of a product, then by all means, make 50 pages. But if you can't generate the content necessary to establish each individual page as "quality", then I would remove them, and simply not go that route at all, and 301 redirect all those pages into the main page. If you think it still holds value to users, then keep them up and just use a canonical tag.
-
Hi There
From what you've described, it does sound like Duplicate Content is a potential issue for your site, it's great that you're addressing it.
A Canonical Tag as you've suggested is a logical and sensible course of action. Correctly implemented, this will certainly help.
One thought, what would provide the best user experience for your visitors? Have a think about whether these 'additional' pages actually add any value or not for your visitors. I suspect that you could include every different color of a certain type of widget on a single page for each type, rather than having separate pages for each color.
In this scenario, consider 301 redirecting those additional/duplicate pages to the main appropriate widget page, that would almost certainly provide a cleaner better user experience. Obviously need to take into account your business objectives and target audience goals when making such a decision.
So really, it's Canonicals or 301s, depending on what best matches your business objectives and the user experience.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
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
-
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Deeper Levels = Lower Page Authority?
After migrating 8 sites into one last year, which went quite successfully, we're now looking into SEO much deeper and how we can improve overall. Something I have noticed is the deeper the pages, the longer the url, the lower the page authority. It almost halves for each level the page gets deeper. Is this true? And if so how can we combat this? I know content is key, but is there anything else we can do? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Similar page titles but not quite duplicate
Howdy Mozzers, I have a problem with the way Google now tries not to show more than one search result per site on the first page. As in it is a lot harder to be ranked number 1 - 10 twice with different pages. Some of my pages have similar yet different page titles so they use the same first two keywords and then a variable such as '(keyword) (keyword) installations' '(keyword) (keyword) surveys'. Then when I search for '(keyword) (keyword)' they all appear at the start of page two with only ever one of them moving onto the end of page one. Now, it could just be that they are not quite optimised for page 1 but I think it would be more holding back of pages so they don't flood page 1. Any help on this? And also is there a problem with having similar page titles for pages? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Which duplicate content should I remove?
I have duplicate content and am trying to figure out which URL to remove. What should I take into consideration? Authority? How close to the root the page is? How clear the path is? Would appreciate your help! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Internal Pages outranking homepage in SERPs
First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem. We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting. However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not. Does this indicate some coding problem with the website? I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0