Dealing with close content - duplicate issue for closed products
-
Hello
I'm dealing with some issues. Moz analyses is telling me that I have duplicate on some of my products pages.
My issue is that:
- Concern very similar products
- IT products are from the same range
- Just the name and pdf are different
Do you think I should use canonical url ? Or it will be better to rewrite about 80 descriptions (but description will be almost the same) ?
Best regards.
-
Hello
Actually we though about it when we released the website. The current heading, Title and PDF files are driving some traffic.
As we have thousands of references it's not so easy to get different, and quality content.
I think for now how gonna manually change the 80 duplicate content. But you're definitely right it would be better to get some more options as feedback and reviews.
I gonna think about a way to do this.
Tks a lot !
-
Thanks for the example. It seems that for a server there would be more information about it that that paragraph. Processor information, RAM, disk space, ports etc. I just did a search and found this info
https://www.avantidataproducts.com/product/ibm/7379c2u
I think the bigger problem is not differentiating these pages from each other on your own site, but differentiating from other sites.
This is just good old content development. You need to see if there is a way to tap into people rating and leaving comments. Do you have any case studies on this product etc. Can you find any other media on it, can you create it. Go to Zappos.com they produce a ton of videos that just describe a pair of shoes. Do you have someone who could be your video representative and you shoot a bunch of videos on your top products and embed them.
I think otherwise, you are just going to be similar to everyone else with the same product.
-
Hello !
In this case it would be
- http://www.ibremarketing.com/item/ibm-7379c2u-x3400-m3.html
- http://www.ibremarketing.com/item/ibm-7379f2u-x3400-m3.html
I do not like the canonical neither are people are finding those references on Google.
As it's a catalog managed in bulk important with many references it's hard to create 1 page as I need also to get the reference on the title ...
So except rewriting the content, do you think there is another option ?
Tks anyway for such a quick answer
-
Hard to say without seeing the products and so you may not get much response here more than "it depends". Sit down and be creative, you may be able see if the differences can be highlighted enough that they are different from the others and so you can use them.
Here is what I would do. If you have 4 versions of a widget, create 1 page with information on all four of them. Then you can talk about all of them at once and optimize around the 4 versions. Lets say you have a red, blue and green widget - those are the only differences and everything else is the same. The page should talk about how great the widget is, talk about the 4 colors, have pictures of the widget in all 4 colors, let people vote on what color they like the best, have links to PDFs on each of the 4 widgets etc. This may be the better approach.
I am just not sure about using of the canonical as people probably need to be able to find the different versions of the widget and so you need to make sure that the information is out there. If you setup a page for the 4 versions and then canonical 3 of the versions to the 1, you are still "de-emphasizing" the other 3 versions that people may be searching for.
I really try to only use canonicals if there is an exact duplicate (say a printer friendly version of the original) or I use it for business purpose. Example: I have one site that has city and zip search options for locations - I canonical all my zip result pages to the parent city page - I do this as I know 1) for this area people do not search in the SERPs by zip code so no use optimizing around zips, and 2) the zip pages are pretty much dups of the city page anyway. I only leave the zip pages on my site as an option from a usability for people once they hit my site if they want to search that way.
Good luck!
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 across different domains
Hi Guys, Looking for some advice regarding duplicate content across different domains. I have reviewed some previous Q&A on this topic e.g. https://moz.com/community/q/two-different-domains-exact-same-content but just want to confirm if I'm missing anything. Basically, we have a client which has 1 site (call this site A) which has solids rankings. They have decided to build a new site (site B), which contains 50% duplicate pages and content from site A. Our recommendation to them was to make the content on site B as unique as possible but they want to launch asap, so not enough time. They will eventually transfer over to unique content on the website but in the short-term, it will be duplicate content. John Mueller from Google has said several times that there is no duplicate content penalty. So assuming this is correct site A should be fine, no ranking losses. Any disagree with this? Assuming we don't want to leave this to chance or assume John Mueller is correct would the next best thing to do is setup rel canonical tags between site A and site B on the pages with duplicate content? Then once we have unique content ready, execute that content on the site and remove the canonical tags. Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
How do I use public content without being penalized for duplication?
The NHTSA produces a list of all recalls for automobiles. In their "terms of use" it states that the information can be copied. I want to add that to our site, so there is an up-to-date list for our audience to see. However, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm allowed to according to NHTSA, but google will probably flag it right? Is there a way to do this without being penalized? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?
I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way. The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0