Duplicate Content Vs No Content
-
Hello!
A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?".
We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website.
We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here.
I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO?
Thanks!
-
If i strictly stay up to the question then i would go this way...
1. If the content is really awesome for for duplicate but always ad the canonical tag so that you do not die in the SE world.
2. If the content is just tons of words on the page to fill the container... its better to let the container go empty!
-
Hello Moosa,
Thanks for the advice. Based on your reply and the one above, I am going to look at implementing a user comment system tonight. However, I am also interested in any other ideas or general advice about no content vs duplicate content.
Thanks!
-
I am not sure the idea will take you out of panda or penguin but my ideas will defiantly going to kill the duplicate content on pages that you are facing at the moment
Add UGC:
It’s difficult for people for businesses to add UGC on their website as many are not comfortable with it but if you are then I would suggest to add UGC on their website that include game reviews, page comments and more...
The Game Talk:
Similar to UGC but here they will be restricted to talk about game cheats, tricks, and tactics only...
The more transparent you can be the more ideas will come in to your mind that will help you get away from duplicate content issue but again I am not sure if this is going to take you out of panda or penguin.
-
Wordpress is good or you can provide both the options for commenting. The disqus comment plugin for wordpress is great.
-
Hello,
Thank you for the response. In regards to the rel tags, we actually bought this website about a month before penguin, so the duplicate content was already there (and we were ranking very well). However, the point you raised about user comments is a good one, that would give us some more content.
In that case, is the wordpress comment system the way to go, or the Facebook system?
Thanks!
-
How valuable is the site traffic to you. If you monetize the site traffic well then you should definitely invest in creating unique content for the site. You could have avoided these issues if you had used the rel canonical tag to identify the source of the content. It also matters on how much of the content is duplicated . If it's only a small percentage then it should make that much of a difference.
Based on the info provided and the fact that you have already been hit with google's updates, you should invest in creating unique content. Along with content also create unique meta tags for the pages as well as encourage user interaction on the game pages with reviews /comments.
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 content question
Hey Mozzers! I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit. I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer. I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue: Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose. Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right. Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site). Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case? Thanks in advance for your help. AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
To what extent is content considered unique or duplicate?
I work primarily on classifieds websites and an issue I consistently come across are two or more URLs which have the exact same ad count, due to site structure and the way everything is categorized. An example of such would be with these two pages: https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/motorboats/princess https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/boats-for-sale/princess/power These two have the exact same number of ads- would search engines mark these as duplicate content? Both have different meta descriptions, title tags etc. but essentially the MC is exactly the same. If they are, what would be the best course to remedy the problem? I'm skeptical about using canonical tags as I generally use them for exact duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Large Scale Ecommerce. How To Deal With Duplicate Content
Hi, One of our clients has a store with over 30,000 indexed pages but less then 10,000 individual products and make a few hundred static pages. Ive crawled the site in Xenu (it took 12 hours!) and found it to by a complex mess caused by years of hack add ons which has caused duplicate pages, and weird dynamic parameters being indexed The inbound link structure is diversified over duplicate pages, PDFS, images so I need to be careful in treating everything correctly. I can likely identify & segment blocks of 'thousands' of URLs and parameters which need to be blocked, Im just not entirely sure the best method. Dynamic Parameters I can see the option in GWT to block these - is it that simple? (do I need to ensure they are deinxeded and 301d? Duplicate Pages Would the best approach be to mass 301 these pages and then apply a no-index tag and wait for it to be crawled? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Does 'framing' a website create duplicate content?
Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations. The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site. What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all. Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content? This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Duplicate content connundrum
Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0