Does Google index dynamically generated content/headers, etc.?
-
To avoid dupe content, we are moving away from a model where we have 30,000 pages, each with a separate URL that looks like /prices/<product-name>/<city><state>, often with dupe content because the product overlaps from city to city, and it's hard to keep 30,000 pages unique, where sometimes the only distinction is the price & the city/state.</state></city></product-name>
We are moving to a model with around 300 unique pages, where some of the info that used to be in the url will move to the page itself (headers, etc.) to cut down on dupe content on those unique 300 pages.
My question is this. If we have 300 unique-content pages with unique URL's, and we then put some dynamic info (year, city, state) into the page itself, will Google index this dynamic content?
The question behind this one is, how do we continue to rank for searches for that product in the city-state being searched without having that info in the URL?
Any best practices we should know about?
-
Hi there,
Not sure I have enough information to weigh in on the first part of your question - Google will index whatever it sees on the page. If you deliver the content to Google, then they index it. The problem comes when you deliver different content to different users. Try a tool like SEO Browser to see how googlebot views your site.
To answer your second question, its often hard to rank near-duplicate pages for specific cities/states without running into massive duplicate content problems. Matt Cutts himself actually addressed this awhile back. He basically stated if you have multiple pages all targeting different locations, it's best to include a few lines of unique content on each page (I recommend the top) to make each unique.
“In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine,” Source
But this technique would be very hard with only 300 product page. The alternative, stuffing these pages with city/state information for every combination possible, is not advised.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/on-page-optimization-to-rank-for-multiply-cities
So in the end, it's actually not hard to rank for city-state keywords without having it in the URL, but the information should be in the content or other places like the title tag or internal link structure - but to do this for 1000's of locations with only 300 pages without keyword stuffing is near impossible.
The best thing to do is figure out how to create unique content for every page you want to rank for, and take that route.
For example, I might create a "Seattle" page, create unique content for the top of the page, then list 50 or so products with the unique Seattle prices. (This is a rough strategy - you'd have to refine it greatly to work for your situation.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I see. To get the city-state pages indexed then they must have their own URL. If you can only access it via posting a form (assumed for using the search feature), the a search engine can't see it.
To get round this, you could put a links underneath the search box to popular searches. This will get them indexed.
Does that answer the questions?
Thanks
Iain - Reload
-
Thanks for the reply. The city-state content wouldn't be driven by the URL, it would be driven by the city-state that the user searched for. ie if the person searched for <product><city><state>I would want our /product/ page to show up, and show them content in their local city state.</state></city></product>
-
Hi Editable Text,
In short if you show Google a crawlable link to the content with the dynamic header/content, and the content is driven by the unique URL, yes it will index it.
As with any SEO/life question, there are a few t&c's with this.
- The pages need to be unique enough not to be classed as duplicate content
- Make sure it's intelligently linked internally
- You have external links pointing deep into the site
- You have a decent site architecture
To answer you second question, you'll need unique pages for each location, unless your content would be so thin, you'd need to group them. The URL doesn't have to include the keyword, but it's damn helpful if it does.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
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
-
Https://www.fitness-china.com/leg-press-feet-placement youtube video affects website speed
In our blog, about Leg Press Feet Placement [https://www.fitness-china.com/leg-press-feet-placement](https://www.fitness-china.com/leg-press-feet-placement) we have added a lot of youtube videos to enrich the content of the article but we found that youtube videos affect the speed of the website, how to solve it
On-Page Optimization | | ahislop5740 -
My website is not indexing the image.
Our website's images are not indexed. Will anyone help me? How will all images in my website be indexed? This is my website address: https://www.expertclipping.com/
On-Page Optimization | | jacky_risham0 -
Where does Google get its meta descriptions from?
We have a new client and they don't have meta descriptions yet. However, Google has assigned descriptions for them now appearing on the SERPs. The problem is that Google added a phone number that's totally not the client's and goes to a different unrelated business. Our plan is to update the meta to reflect the correct information, however, we're just perplexed as to how Google came up with the incorrect phone number. Where does it get its information from? The page currently has all the correct phone number, hours, and content. I've read that Google sometimes also doesn't recognise our meta descriptions if it thinks they could serve up a better one. My next question is, what if Google insists on showing the incorrect phone number. Is there a way we can fix this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez2 -
Indexed/Submitted URLS vs Total Indexed
Hello, My site is www.colbysphotography.com. I have Total Indexed 195 while I have 87 URLs submitted and only 79 URLs Indexed. What is the difference and is there a problem? Thanks ahead of time,
On-Page Optimization | | littlecolby
Colby0 -
Posting content from our books to our website
Hello, I am the newly appointed in-house seo person for a small business. The founders of our company have written several books, which we sell. But book sales are a small part of our business. We are considering posting to our website some or all of the content of the books. This content is directly relevant to the existing content of our website and would be available for free to all visitors. 1. Is it likely that the traffic and links to the new book pages would improve the search engine rankings of our existing pages? 2. We already have pdf versions of each book we could post, which are formatted nicely. Should we convert these to html to make them more friendly to search engines? 3. Of course, we would have to split each book into multiple web pages, perhaps one chapter per page. How much content could each new page optimally accommodate? 4. Would it be more valuable from an SEO perspective to post pieces of the books over time in a blog format? Thank you very much for your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
When it comes to duplicate page content how do I deal with correcting it. Its a dynamic e commerce site.
I am under the impression that with ecommerce sites this happens often and that there's a plug in or just simply not worry about it since queries will often find similar conent.
On-Page Optimization | | Wayne_c0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
Duplicate content because of content scrapping - please help
We manage brands websites in a very competitive industry that have thousands of affiliate links We see that more and more websites (mainly affiliates websites) are scrapping our brand websites content and it generate many duplicate content (but most of them link to us back with an affiliate link). Our brand websites still rank for any sentence in brackets you search in Google, Will this duplicate content hurt our brand websites ? If yes, should we take some preventive actions ? We are not able to add ongoing UGC or additional text to all our duplicate content and trying to stop those websites of stealing our content is like playing cat and mouse... Thanks for your advices
On-Page Optimization | | Tit0