How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
-
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry)
Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example)
Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword.
These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc)
Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure
So - to questions/thoughts.
1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally.
2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them)
3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant?
4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that?
I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
-
I think your header links will look spammy.
Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).
-
Great help here folks, thanks.
One last question if i may - each of the 3 sites links to the other 2 in the header (on every page), so i've got x00 cross-referencing links.
Any value in making them rel=no-follow? Don't want to remove them necessarily.
-
IIS7 supports a type of mod_rewrite. But even if you can't use that, you should have access to ASP or .NET and can easily use those to do your 301s
-
ISS has no problems doing 301s, and if you can use php, asp or anything similar you can just manualy put a 301 on each page if that fails.
No rel-canonical solution will result in all 3 sites ranking as far as I am aware.
Your best option is usualy one site with geo-located pages. If it has to be 3 sites, then the only real option is to make all that content unique, on unique ips e.t.c., which at the end of the day is 3X the work or more.
-
No problem, best of luck and let us know how you get on!
-
Thanks for all the replies everyone. Tricky isn't it?
Moving to 1 site is probably the best medium/long-term option. The 3 sites thing is historical in that sites 2 and 3 were purchased (physically) by the owner over last few years.
Biggest problem with totally new is that (afaik anyway, according to hosting company) i can't 301 old sites to this new site due to the shared hosting issue (using IIS as well, not Apache), so perhaps getting them split out is proper interim measure. (I might be able to do something via WMTools with this though i guess)
Will do some more research into use of canonical cross-domain and attempt the on-page rewrite as well as talking to client about moving sites to unique hosts.
thanks again.
-
why is it hard to restate the content in a different way? reword it. If it's products then change the order and write unique content on the bottom. By east west north south exactly what types of regions are you talking about and why do you need three sites to accomplish this instead of one with geo targeted LPs?
-
you can certainly use the canonical, however you probably wont rank from domains 2 and 3 as your telling Google not to attribute the content to those domains.
I'm still missing the bit where having thee regionalized sites is beneficial to your visitors, why not make one general site with the products and then do some geo-targeted pages?(thats what I would do, makes for a much simpler task).
best of luck with which ever way you go, but come back and let us know what happens
-
The benefit to the user is that they will need to visit physical site to view/purchase and as such, wouldn't click on say, North site (even if it was top 2 or 3) if they were in South.
Are you (both) saying it'd be ok to link rel canonical domain1/page.html on domains 2 and 3? (i.e. different domain names)
Thanks.
-
how is this for good measure?
"Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure :)"
Make them as unique and separate as possible. Different templates, different hosting, different email contact, different contact info on domain registration, write content on the page and geo target the wording.
-
What is the benefit to the user for an individual sites for North, South and west?
Are you not just creating a lot of work for yourself, especially since as you state ''would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally" which ultimately means each site is competing against the others.
I would rethink my strategy, Your more likely to rank 'generally' for your chosen terms if you focus your efforts on one site and perhaps use canonical tags on the other two to ensure Google knows who to attribute the content too.
-
There's not too many options here. Geotargeted (even locally) tends to produce duplicate content. The only option, really, is to canonical all your products to one place. If you do it right, you might be able to rank all three sites for your keyword.
You can try #1 but, as you said, it's hard to restate the same content in a non-duplicated way.
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
-
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Http vs. https - duplicate content
Hi I have recently come across a new issue on our site, where https & http titles are showing as duplicate. I read https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https however, am wondering as https is now a ranking factor, blocked this can't be a good thing? We aren't in a position to roll out https everywhere, so what would be the best thing to do next? I thought about implementing canonicals? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How to solve our duplicate content issue? (Possible Session ID problem)
Hi there, We've recently took on a new developer who has no experience in any technical SEO and we're currently redesigning our site www.mrnutcase.com. Our old developer was up to speed on his SEO and any technical issues we never really had to worry about. I'm using Moz as a tool to go through crawl errors on an ad-hoc basis. I've noticed just now that we're recording a huge amount of duplicate content errors ever since the redesign commenced (amongst other errors)! For example, the following page is duplicated 100s of times: https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128599&CollageID=21&ProductValue=2293 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128735&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3387 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128510&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3364 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128511&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3363 etc etc. Does anyone know how I should be dealing with this problem? And is this something that needs to be fixed urgently? This problem has never happened before so i'm hoping it's an easy enough fix. Look forward to your responses and greatly appreciate the help. Many thanks, Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi. I am getting error of having duplicate content on my website and pages its showing there are: www.mysitename.com www.mysitename.com/index.html As my best knowledge it only one page, I know this can be solved with some conical tag used in header, but do not know how. Can anyone please tell me about that code or any other way to get this solved. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetraffic0