Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Real Estate MLS listings - Does Google Consider duplicate content?
-
I have a real estate website. The site has all residential properties for sale in a certain State (MLS property listings). These properties also appear on 100's of other real estate sites, as the data is pulled from a central place where all Realtors share their listings.
Question: will having these MLS listings indexed and followed by Google increase the ratio of duplicate vs original content on my website and thus negatively affect ranking for various keywords? If so, should I set the specific property pages as "no index, no follow" so my website will appear to have less duplicate content?
-
thank you, Moosa. Let me give you an example: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/waikiki-real-estate-condos-for-sale/ - on that page "Waikiki Condos for Sale" I have created a landing page which seems popular with users. I do not want to add content to the page just to keep search engines happy. As you will notice, there are 30+ pages for this "Waikiki condos for sale" page. It is not directly duplicate content, as my site shows different layout and wording that other sites, but it does not change the fact that the listings are identical. I have corrected added the rel=next prev tags and maybe that is enough. However, I wonder, should I "no index, follow" page 2, 3, 4 of the series, with the reasoning I will have less duplicate content? Or, will such no indexing lead search engines to think my "Waikiki condos for sale" page has that much less content than competitors and therefore struggle to rank? On a bigger scale, not focused specifically on this "Waikiki condos for sale" page, will the "no index" part help the rest of my site perform better, as the ratio of original vs copied content will improve?
-
I go by the basic rule here, if the two different URLs displaying identical information then this will be considered as duplicated content but including no-index, no-follow tag is also not a good idea as this will affect your traffic and conversions.
All websites are fetching the data from the central resource but you got the ability to display it differently! Like try to display only the related information about the properly and in the rest of the page you can add UGC, content related to the property, some tips or something similar kind of content and more…
In the ecommerce world, we tend to see different websites selling the same products and that is why the pages become identical sometimes so in order to avoid that we try to add extra content like UGC, tips, videos or more to make the page unique in the eye of Google as well as a little more interactive for search engines.
Hope this helps!
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
-
How do Yelp and Justia get all the extra Meta Description Real estate?
I was doing some KW research for a client and noticed something interesting with regard to Yelp and Justia. For a search on DWI Attorneys, they each had over 300 character meta descriptions showing on the SERP without truncating. Everyone else was either truncated or within limit of roughly 160 characters. Obviously if there is a way to get something other than a list to show that way you can own some real estate. Would love to hear from some of you Mozzers on this. Here are two images that should assist. Best Edit: I found one that was not a directory site and it appears it is Google doing it. The site has no meta description for the home page and this is what is being pulled by Google. There are 327 characters here! The truncation marks are showing it being pulled from different parts of the page. Image is Killeen DWI Attorney. NOTE None of these are clients, etc. I also changed the cities so this is a general search. zAQpA qZ9KI 06p7U
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher1 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Duplicate content on sites from different countries
Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website. Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension. Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world? Any statement from Google about this? Regards, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
How do I geo-target continents & avoid duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a website which will have content tailored for a few locations: USA: www.site.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
Europe EN: www.site.com/eu
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr-ca Link hreflang and the GWT option are designed for countries. I expect a fair amount of duplicate content; the only differences will be in product selection and prices. What are my options to tell Google that it should serve www.site.com/eu in Europe instead of www.site.com? We are not targeting a particular country on that continent. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0