New Client Wants to Keep Duplicate Content Targeting Different Cities
-
We've got a new client who has about 300 pages on their website that are the same except the cities that are being targeted. Thus far the website has not been affected by penguin or panda updates, and the client wants to keep the pages because they are bringing in a lot of traffic for those cities.
We are concerned about duplicate content penalties; do you think we should get rid of these pages or keep them?
-
This is a tough situation. I tend to agree with Ricky - these are exactly the kinds of pages that have been hit by Panda, and there's real risk. In the old days, the biggest risk was that the pages would just stop getting traffic. Now, the impact could hit the rest of the site as well, and it's a lot more dangerous.
The problem is that it's working for now, and you're asking them to give up traffic in the short-term to avoid losing it in the long-term. Again, I think the long-term risk is serious (and it's not that easy to recover from), but the short-term pain to the client is very real.
What's the scope of the 300 pages compared to the rest of the site (are we talking a 400 page site or a 40,000 page site)? How many of these city pages are getting real traffic? My best alternative solution is to pin down the 10-20% of the city pages getting most of the traffic, temporarily NOINDEX the rest, and then beef up those well-trafficked city pages with unique content (so, maybe you're talking about 30 pages). Then, build out from there.
Give these pages real value - it's not only good for SEO, but it will probably improve conversion, too. The other problem with pages that just swap out a city is that they're often low quality - they may draw traffic in, but then have high bounce rates and low conversion. If you can show that you can improve the value, even with some traffic loss, it's easier to win this fight.
-
Does the analytics support specific city search terms targeting those city specific pages, or going to the home page (or the canonical version of the duplicate content page)?
If it is the later, then you certainly should move those city specific keyword terms into the single version of the duplicate content in some creative fashion.
Regardless you still should remove the duplicate content, preferably sooner than later because they are certainly low value pages!
-
I agree with Ricky - I would slowly make all those pages unique in some way. I still find it beneficial to rank to different city pages as long as they have prime content. Google will eventually sift its way and find those pages as spam.
-
It seems to me that Google would see all of that duplicate content and simply have 1 page ranking as the canonical page. If they are seeing organic traffic and rankings for multiple pages, I am not sure how long that will last. From what I understand, it would be best to start the slow process of making the content on each page somewhat unique.
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
-
Product Attribute pages and Duplicate content
Hiya I have two queries is about a jewellery shop running on wordpress and woocommerce. 1. I am a little indecisive on how to index the product categories without creating duplicate pages which will get me into trouble. For example: All earrings are listed on the category page: chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ We also have product attribute pages which lists all the subcategories for the earrings: chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/creoles/
On-Page Optimization | | bongoheads
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/drop/
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/studs/ I have the category URL and the product attribute URLs set to be indexed on my sitemaps. Will this get me into trouble creating duplicate content with the main category page? Should I only have the main category indexed and "no-index, follow" all the product attribute pages? 2. I am also thinking about incorporating these product attribute URLS into my menu so when people hover over earrings they get shown the types of earrings they can buy. However, I have the woocommerce faceted navigation working on the category pages. So if someone is visiting the page chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ The user can click on the left hand side, and select "drops". The URL they will get though is one which is not indexed: http://www.chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/?filter_earrings=123 Can I link to those product attribute pages without the risk of getting accused of creating duplicate content? Thank you for your help. Carolina0 -
My company's product is referred to by two different names (SVN and Subversion). When cleaning up our Title tags, is it OK to use either name to keep the title tags around 70 characters?
I am cleaning up title tags that are too long or not correct. In our title tag we reference our product (a version of OSS source code). This product is often referred to as both SVN or Subversion. When writing Title tags is it OK to use one or the other depending on the length of the Title Tag? For instance: Contact Us | Free SVN & Git Hosting | Bug & Issue tracking | CloudForge vs **About CloudForge | Free Subversion & Git Hosting | Bug Tracking ** | |
On-Page Optimization | | CollabNet0 -
Removing syndicated duplicate content from website - what steps do I need to take to make sure Google knows?
Hey all, So I've made the decision to cancel the service that provides my blog with regular content / posts, since it seems that having duplicate content on my site isn't doing me any favors. So I'm on a Wordpress system - I'll be exporting the posts so I have them for reference, and then deleting the posts. There are like 150 or so - What steps should I take to ensure that Google learns of the changes I've made? Or do I not need to do anything at all in that department? Also - I guess I've assumed that the best decision would be to 'remove' the content from my blog. IS that the best way to go? Or should I leave it in place and start adding unique content? (my guess is that I need to remove it...) Thanks for your help, Kurt
On-Page Optimization | | KurtBullock0 -
Tags creating duplicated content issue?
Hello i believe a lot of us use tags in our blogs as a way to categorize content and make it easy searchable but this usually (at lease in my case) cause duplicate content creation. For example, if one article has 2 tags like "SEO" & "Marketing", then this article will be visible and listed in 2 urls inside the blog like this domain.com/blog/seo and domain.com/blog/marketing In case of a blog with 300+ posts and dozens of different tags this is creating a huge issue. My question is 1. Is this really bad? 2. If yes how to fix it without removing tags?
On-Page Optimization | | Lakiscy0 -
User experience regarding dulpicate content and managing this content with google.
Hi long title i know! We are moving on to magento and have chosen to allocate a specific colour to each category using corresponding tabbed navigation for user experience.All products within each of the coloured tabs then inherit the repective colour, giving the products a category identiy within the store. This layout has had a positive feedback from our "testers" As a lot of our products are seasonal and can be represented in different categories there is a significant amount of duplicate content. ATM i see our options as being: Alter the site structure so that the category is not shown in the url, therefore eliminating our duplicate products. The downside of this is that the colour co-ordination of the categories would not work at product level as its the category path that assigns the colour. create canonical links for every duplicate, can this be damaging? keep the duplicates and do nothing let google decide the most important version of a product. any guidance would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Duplicate content? Not sure.
Good news! I have my first real SEO gig and now I have to be able to actually deliver. I'm up for it but I want to be sure I'm seeing what I think I am before suggesting any changes. I'm working my way throught Danny Dover's excellent book SEO Secrets and learning tons! To see if there is duplicate content on the site, I've taken a sentence from one of the pages on the site and searched for it: i.e., site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone." The SERPs show 7 pages that have this text on it. It seems like this is duplicate content, right? This is a Wordpress website so what's happening is the actual page is here: www.storybooksforhealing.com/publish-cup-of-joy/ but there are several archive pages that show excerpts of this text, too. If this is duplicate content (first question) then how would I go about remedying it? Should I set the canonical reference to /publish-cup-of-joy page? Thank you for being patient with my NOOB questions.
On-Page Optimization | | ChristiMc0 -
Duplicate content on video pages
Hi guys, We have a video section on our site containing about 50 videos, grouped by category/difficulty. On each video page except for the embedded player, a sentence or two describing the video and a list of related video links, there's pretty much nothing else. All of those appear as duplicate content by category. What should we do here? How long a description should be for those pages to appear unique for crawlers? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | lgrozeva0 -
Duplicate content issues with products page 1,2,3 and so on
Hi, we have this products page, for example of a landing page:
On-Page Optimization | | Essentia
http://www.redwrappings.com.au/australian-made/gift-ideas and then we have the link to page 2,3,4 and so on:
http://www.redwrappings.com.au/products.php?c=australian-made&p=2
http://www.redwrappings.com.au/products.php?c=australian-made&p=3 In SEOmoz, they are recognized as duplicate page contents.
What would be the best way to solve this problem? One easy way i can think of is to nominate the first landing page to be the 'master' page (http://www.redwrappings.com.au/australian-made/gift-ideas), and add canonical meta links on page 2,3 and so on. Any other suggestions? Thanks 🙂0