Advice on Duplicate Page Content
-
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them.
For example -
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rsWe have many such pages.
Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?
-
EGOL, Everett,
Thank you both for your very useful suggestions. Sounds like we should do something similar to our PDF documents to represent them as the actual/canonical content on the page. And we'll look at our CMS to see how we might implement the unlinked page name in the breadcrumb. We have done some work already in adding structured data with schemas (including aggregate ratings), so that is hopefully yielding some results already.
However, after an encouraging traffic spike that seemed to indicate that we were on the right track, we saw a very worrisome dip last month.... which then led to a lot of worried hand wringing about Panda.
So these suggestions are very helpful ; thanks again and we'll try them out!
-
Thank you, Everett,
Nice to see you posting in Q&A.
Look forward to seeing you regularly.
-
Hello Sudhir,
Those two pages would not be seen as duplicates. Google is very capable of separating the template from the content.
On a side note, you should look into getting the name of the page/game into the breadcrumb, though it doesn't have to be linked like the previous two pages in the path. For example:
You are here: Home --> Common --> Find Easter Eggs
Allowing visitors to review and rate the games would provide useful, keyword-rich, natural content on an otherwise content-sparse page. Once reviews/ratings are implemented you could also use Schema.org markup to enhance your search engine results by showing star ratings next to each game.
Good luck!
-
Google knows how to separate the template of the site from the content. So you have nothing to worry about if most of the code on your pages is the same code that is used on every other page.
I looked at your two sample pages and saw a few things that would concern me...
This page had very little content. If you have lots of pages with such a tiny amount of content you could have Panda problems.
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
You also have pages like this....
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs-view
These have very little content.
I have a site with lots of printable content that is mainly images placed in .pdf documents to control the scale of the printing and the look of the printed page. The pages used to present them to visitors and the pdf documents were all thin content and my site had a Panda problem. That cause the rankings of every page on the site to fall and really damaged my traffic. I solved that by noindexing the html pages and applying rel=canonical to the pdf files using .htacess.
I can't say if this will happen to you but I would be uncomfortable if I had a site with such little content on its pages.
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Duplicate content on job sites
Hi, I have a question regarding job boards. Many job advertisers will upload the same job description to multiple websites e.g. monster, gumtree, etc. This would therefore be viewed as duplicate content. What is the best way to handle this if we want to ensure our particular site ranks well? Thanks in advance for the help. H
Technical SEO | | HiteshP0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
Advice on improve this content page for seo and google
Hi, i use joomla and i am looking for some help to find out what i should be doing to make my content pages better for seo and google. I would be grateful if people would look at the following page as an example http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/top-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s and let me know what i should be doing to make it better for seo and for google so people can find the page. I am using the above page as an example so i can learn from it. I would be grateful if people could look at the source code for the page to see if there is anything that should be in their that is not and if i should be looking at any joomla plugins for the content pages to improve the seo of the page. Any help to improve my seo for my content pages would be great. many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Noindex duplicate content penalty?
We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit. Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site. In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0