Exponentially Increasing Duplicate Content On Blogs
-
Most of the clients that I pick up are either new to SEO best practices, or have worked with sketchy SEO providers in the past, who did little more than build spammy links. Most of them have deployed little if any on-site SEO best practices, and early on I spend a lot of time fixing canonical and duplicate content issues alla 301 redirects.
Using SEOMOZ, however, I see a lot of duplicate content issues with blogs that live on the sites I work on. With every new blog article we publish, more duplicate content builds up.
I feel like duplicate content on blogs grows exponentially, because every time you write a blog article, it exists provisionally on the blog homepage, the article link, a category page, maybe a tag page, and an author page.
I have a two-part question:
-
Is duplicate content like this a problem for a blog -- and for the website that the blog lives on? Are search engines able to parse out that this isn't really duplicate content?
-
If it is a problem, how would you go about solving it?
Thanks in advance!
-
-
With Wordpress you can no-index category pages, tags, author pages, archives etc.
Most of the SEO plugins let you do this, I know Yoast's plugin does it for sure.
Also make sure your site is using canonical tags and you should be good.
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
-
Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content
I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries. I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website. They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed. The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”. The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth. This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content. I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content. My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility). I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | cassy_rich0 -
Unique Pages with Thin Content vs. One Page with Lots of Content
Is there anyone who can give me a definitive answer on which of the following situations is preferable from an SEO standpoint for the services section of a website? 1. Many unique and targeted service pages with the primary keyword in the URL, Title tag and H1 - but with the tradeoff of having thin content on the page (i.e. 100 words of content or less). 2. One large service page listing all services in the content. Primary keyword for URL, title tag and H1 would be something like "(company name) services" and each service would be in the H2 title. In this case, there is lots of content on the page. Yes, the ideal situation would be to beef up content for each unique pages, but we have found that this isn't always an option based on the amount of time a client has dedicated to a project.
On-Page Optimization | | RCDesign741 -
Duplicated content by the product pages
Hi,Do you thing those pages have duplicate content:https://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards-401.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-401.html.And also how much impact will it have on a panda update?I'm trying to figure out if all the product pages, (that are in the same way as the ones above) are the reson for a Panda Penalty
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
I have a lot of internal duplicate content as intros to a series of articles, is this bad?
On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"): And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site 🙂 but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate. http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour1 -
Solve duplicate content issues by using robots.txt
Hi, I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok? Thank for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
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 -
Numbers above actual site content
Most pages on my website contain many numbers above the actual text on the page. This is useful for users and looks good on an actual view of the page. However, when a bot reads the page it appears as rows of numbers with a few sentences at the bottom of the page. Does having these number have a negative SEO effect? If so, should I change them to something such as an image so they aren't readable by search engines?
On-Page Optimization | | theLotter0