Local Search | Website Issue with Duplicate Content (97 pages)
-
Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page.
Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page.
Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?
-
Thank you Miriam.
-
Thanks Miriam!
-
Hi Todd, I'm endorsing Kevin's response as a best answer on this, but also want to add that it will be easier on the client if he makes a plan now to begin to improve the content of key pages rather than scramble to do so after rankings suddenly fall off. Local rankings are in a constant state of flux...drops can happen so swiftly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I would identify the 10 most important cities and write unique content for them, then move on to the 10 next-most important and so on. Do it in a way the client can afford, at a velocity you can manage.
-
Good morning Kevin - most of the individual pages receive little traffic. Thank you for your advice and feedback.
-
Hi Daniel - thank you for response and advice!
-
Hi Todd,
How much traffic is each of those pages getting? Chances are if you look at them over 50% of them are getting little if any traffic. As you know, ranking on the first page in local search really doesn't mean much. You need to be in the top 3 (or 3-5 if maps is displaying results).
My advice would be to help the client focus on the best areas (Based on traffic, demographics, distance, etc.) and the ones that are currently driving traffic then create unique content for each of those pages. This could also bring down the too many links per page signal.
I did this with one of my clients and their rank improved to where they were #1 & #2 for their top 10 areas that were driving 90% of their traffic. If they want to continue targeting all 97 each page should have unique content. Their rankings will definitely improve if done right.
Anyways, I know it's a balancing act of the best strategy and what the clients budget will allow you to do so in the end you have to make the best decision.
Cheers,
Kevin
-
I myself have done this for many clients. I have used a generic paragraph with near duplicate content on over 3000+ pages for one client and it has been going strong for many years. I have also tested websites with near 100% duplicate body text with exception to title, description, h1, image alts and they are ranking good as well with no problems.
I would advise the client of the risk of having duplicate content. You could use textbroker to write some content for each page at around $5 each just to be safe and to feel comfortable moving forward with SEO.
Most of my clients have come to me from other SEO's and I'm always wondering what will drop off when I optimize something because the work was clearly black/grey hat. The good thing is they know the value of SEO already and agree to pay to just fix old issues before moving forward most of the time.
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
-
Duplicate Landing Pages showing up in search results
Hey Guys, I recently noticed that our Christmas Gifts landing page was ranking twice in the Google serps for the query "Christmas Gifts." One of these pages is an old url that has already been 301 redirected to the new url page which is also showing up in the search results. In the results, the following shows up in position 2 & 3 for the Christmas Gifts query: <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/christmas/christmas-gifts</cite> <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/occasions/christmas-gifts/christmas-gifts</cite>The url with "occasions" in it has already been 301 redirected to the url above it. Not sure why this is still showing up. I know it takes Google some time to index 301s and sometimes they show old urls, but it's been a few months since the old "occasions" url was redirected.The title tags for these pages are different but they are actually the same page. The new "gifts" version of the url was made live in the Navigation of our site just last week and before that it was hidden from our Navigation. Would this be the reason it's now showing up in search?Any ideas on why this might be happening? ThanksExplanations?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
Is Noindex Enough To Solve My Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello SEO Gurus! I have a client who runs 7 web properties. 6 of them are satellite websites, and 7th is his company's main website. For a long while, my company has, among other things, blogged on a hosted blog at www.hismainwebsite.com/blog, and when we were optimizing for one of the other satellite websites, we would simply link to it in the article. Now, however, the client has gone ahead and set up separate blogs on every one of the satellite websites as well, and he has a nifty plug-in set up on the main website's blog that pipes in articles that we write to their corresponding satellite blog as well. My concern is duplicate content. In a sense, this is like autoblogging -- the only thing that doesn't make it heinous is that the client is autoblogging himself. He thinks that it will be a great feature for giving users to his satellite websites some great fresh content to read -- which I agree, as I think the combination of publishing and e-commerce is a thing of the future -- but I really want to avoid the duplicate content issue and a possible SEO/SERP hit. I am thinking that a noindexing of each of the satellite websites' blog pages might suffice. But I'd like to hear from all of you if you think that even this may not be a foolproof solution. Thanks in advance! Kind Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Duplicate Content - Home Page even wth Mod Rewrite 301
Hi, It looks like Seomoz (and Screaming Frog) is showing my home page as duplicate content. http://www.mydomain.com Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 http://www.mydomain.com/ Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 [Screaming Frog shows duplicate as]
Technical SEO | | Force7
www.mydomain.com/
www.mydomain.com/index.html} Years ago I hired someone to write the code for a rewrite for non www to be 301 redirected to www version. I was surprised at finding out that I still have a problem. Here is the code on my htaccess page. <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Was this code not properly written ? One more question, we were hit hard by Panda and Penguin, would something like this be that much of a factor. Thanks in advance, Force70 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hi Everyone, I ran into a problem I didn't know I had (Thanks to the seomoz tool) regarding duplicate content. my site is oxford ms homes.net and when I built the site, the web developer used php to build it. After he was done I saw that the URL's looking like this "/blake_listings.php?page=0" and I wanted them like this "/blakes-listings" He changed them with no problem and he did the same with all 300 pages or so that I have on the site. I just found using the crawl diagnostics tool that I have like 3,000 duplicate content issues. Is there an easy fix to this at all or does he have to go in and 301 Redirect EVERY SINGLE URL? Thanks for any help you can give.
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0