Duplicate content advice
-
Im looking for a little advice.
My website has always done rather well on the search engines, although it have never ranked well for my top keywords on my main site as they are very competitive, although it does rank for lots of obscure keywords that contain my top keywords or my top keywords + City/Ares. We have over 1,600 pages on the main site most with unique content on, which is what i attribute to why we rank well for the obscure keywords. Content also changes daily on several main pages.
Recently we have made some updates to the usability of the site which our users are liking (page views are up by 100%, time on site us up, bounce rate is down by 50%!).
However it looks like Google did not like the updates....... and has started to send us less visitors (down by around 25%, across several sites. the sites i did not update (kind of like my control) have been unaffected!).We went through the Panda and Penguin updates unaffected (visitors actually went up!).
So i have joined SEOmoz (and loving it, just like McDonald's). I am now going trough all my sites and making changes to hopefully improve things above and beyond what we used to do.
However out of the 1,600 pages, 386 are being flagged as duplicate content (within my own site), most/half of this is down to; We are a directory type site split into all major cities in the UK.
Cities that don't have listings on, or cities that have the same/similar listing on (as our users provide services to several cities) are been flagged as duplicate content.
Some of the duplicate content is due to dynamic pages that i can correct (i.e out.php?***** i will noindex these pages if thats the best way?)What i would like to know is; Is this duplicate content flags going to be causing me problems, keeping in mind that the Penguin update did not seem to affect us. If so what advise would people here offer?
I can not redirect the pages, as they are for individual cities (and are also dynamic = only one physical page but using URL rewriting). I can however remove links to cities with no listings, although Google already have these pages listed, so i doubt removing the links from my pages and site map will affect this.I am not sure if i can post my URL's here as the sites do have adult content on, although is not porn (we are an Escort Guide/Directory, with some partial nudity).
I would love to hear opinions
-
Ok i will see what can be done about the duplicate content.
Will adding META NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW to the empty directory pages i have, cure any problems that Google may have? (will NOINDEX also stop these pages from showing as duplicate content in SEOmoz, or will they still be shown?)
I have also spotted that several of the duplicate pages are due to www and non-www
So i have updates the settings in Google WebMaster Tools to only list www and also added a .htaccess 301 redirect so all users are directed to www.
Is this the best thing to do?Thanks
Jon -
duplicate content is more likely to be affected by Panda updates not penguin updates. Even though you have not experienced any issues todate I would definitely reduce the duplicate content to a min. Otherwise you may be penalized in the next panda update.
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
-
Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance". I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources. I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank. Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic. Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity? I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | DavidCapital0 -
Is good for SEO update blog post dates after update post content
Hello I am updating some posts of my Blog, adding new and fresh content and rewriting some of the existing. After doing that I am thinking to update de post publishing so that I appears on front page of the blog and user can read ir again. But I don't know if it is good for google to change the publishing date of the post that he had indexed 5 years ago. Also I don't know if google will read it again if it is old and see the new changes in order to improve it in search results
Algorithm Updates | | maestrosonrisas0 -
SEO Myth-Busters -- Isn't there a "duplicate content" penalty by another name here?
Where is that guy with the mustache in the funny hat and the geek when you truly need them? So SEL (SearchEngineLand) said recently that there's no such thing as "duplicate content" penalties. http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657 by the way, I'd love to get Rand or Eric or others Mozzers aka TAGFEE'ers to weigh in here on this if possible. The reason for this question is to double check a possible 'duplicate content" type penalty (possibly by another name?) that might accrue in the following situation. 1 - Assume a domain has a 30 Domain Authority (per OSE) 2 - The site on the current domain has about 100 pages - all hand coded. Things do very well in SEO because we designed it to do so.... The site is about 6 years in the current incarnation, with a very simple e-commerce cart (again basically hand coded). I will not name the site for obvious reasons. 3 - Business is good. We're upgrading to a new CMS. (hooray!) In doing so we are implementing categories and faceted search (with plans to try to keep the site to under 100 new "pages" using a combination of rel canonical and noindex. I will also not name the CMS for obvious reasons. In simple terms, as the site is built out and launched in the next 60 - 90 days, and assume we have 500 products and 100 categories, that yields at least 50,000 pages - and with other aspects of the faceted search, it could create easily 10X that many pages. 4 - in ScreamingFrog tests of the DEV site, it is quite evident that there are many tens of thousands of unique urls that are basically the textbook illustration of a duplicate content nightmare. ScreamingFrog has also been known to crash while spidering, and we've discovered thousands of URLS of live sites using the same CMS. There is no question that spiders are somehow triggering some sort of infinite page generation - and we can see that both on our DEV site as well as out in the wild (in Google's Supplemental Index). 5 - Since there is no "duplicate content penalty" and there never was - are there other risks here that are caused by infinite page generation?? Like burning up a theoretical "crawl budget" or having the bots miss pages or other negative consequences? 6 - Is it also possible that bumping a site that ranks well for 100 pages up to 10,000 pages or more might very well have a linkuice penalty as a result of all this (honest but inadvertent) duplicate content? In otherwords, is inbound linkjuice and ranking power essentially divided by the number of pages on a site? Sure, it may be some what mediated by internal page linkjuice, but what's are the actual big-dog issues here? So has SEL's "duplicate content myth" truly been myth-busted in this particular situation? ??? Thanks a million! 200.gif#12
Algorithm Updates | | seo_plus0 -
Dublicate Content: Almost samt site on different domains
Hi, I own a couple of casting websites, which I'm at the moment launching "local" copies of all over the world. When I launch my website in a new country, the content is basically allways the same, except the language sometimes changes country for country. The domains will vary, so the sitename would be site.es for Spain, site.sg for Singapore, site.dk for Denmark and so. The websites will also feature diffent jobs (castings) and diffent profiles on the search.pages and so, BUT the more static pages are the same content (About us, The concept, Faq, Create user and so). So my Questions are: Is this something that is bad for Google SEO? The sites are atm NOT linking to each other with language-flags or anything - Should I do this? Basically to tell google that
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
the business behind all these sites are somewhat big. Is there a way to inform Google on, that these sites should NOT be treated as dublicate content (Canonical tag wont do, since I want the "same" content to be listet on the locally Google sites). Hope there is some experts here which can help. /Kasper0 -
How important is fresh content?
Lets say the website you are working on has covered most of the important topics on your subject. How important is it that you continue to add content to it when there really may not be much that is so relevant to your users anymore? Can a site continue to rank well if nothing new is added to the site for year but continues to get good quality links?
Algorithm Updates | | DemiGR0 -
Creating Content for Semantic search?
Need some good examples of semantic search friendly content. I have been doing a lot of reading on the subject, but have seen no real good examples of 'this is one way to structure it'. Lots of reading on the topic from an overall satellite perspective, but no clear cut examples I could find of "this is the way the pieces should be put together in a piece of content and this is the most affective ways to accomplish it". **What I know: ** -It needs to answer a question that precludes the 'keyword being used' -It needs to or should be connected to authorship for someone in that topic industry -It should incorporate various social media sources as reference to the topic -It should link out to authoritative resources on the topic -It should use some structured data markup Here is a great resource on the important semantic search pieces: http://www.seoskeptic.com/semantic-seo-making-shift-strings-things/ ,but I want to move past the research into creating the content that will make the connections needed to get the content to rank. I know Storify is an excellent medium to accomplish this off page, but only gives no follow attribution to the topic creator and links their in. I am not a coder, but a marketer and creating the backend markup will really take me out of my wheel house. I don't want to spend all of my time flailing with code when I should be creating compelling semantic content. Any helpful examples or resources welcome. Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | photoseo10 -
Does having a few URLs pointing to another url via 301 "create" duplicate content?
Hello! I have a few URLs all related to the same business sector. Can I point them all at my home domain or should I point them to different relevant content within it? Ioan
Algorithm Updates | | IoanSaid1 -
Google webmaster tool content keywords Top URLs
GWT->Optimization->Content Keywords section... If we click on the keyword it will further shows the variants and Top URLs containing those variants. My problem is none of the important pages like product details pages, homepage or category pages are present in that Top URLs list. All the news, guides section url's are listed in the Top URLs section for most important keyword that is also present in my domain name. How to make google realize the important pages for the important keyword?
Algorithm Updates | | BipSum0