Opinions on Boilerplate Content
-
Howdy,
Ideally, uniqueness for every page's title, description, and content is desired. But when a site is very, very large, it becomes impossible. I don't believe our site can avoid boilerplate content for title tags or meta-descriptions. We will, however, markup the pages with proper microdata so Google can use this information as they please.
What I am curious about is boilerplate content repeated throughout the site for the purpose of helping the user, as well as to tell Google what the page is about (rankings).
For instance, this page and this page offer the same type of services, but in different areas. Both pages (and millions of others) offer the exact same paragraph on each page. The information is helpful to the user, but it's definitely duplicate content. All they've changed is the city name.
I'm curious, what's making this obvious duplicate content issue okay? The additional unique content throughout (in the form of different businesses), the small, yet obvious differences in on-site content (title tags clearly represent different locations), or just the fact that the site is HUGELY authorative and gets away with it?
I'm very curious to hear your opinions on this practice, potential ways to avoid it, and whether or not it's a passable practice for large, but new sites.
Thanks!
-
The SEO of the site is probably fine. The problem with the site is that it takes one page of content and smears it across dozens of thin content, duplicate content, cookie cutter pages. The SEO is lipstick on a pig.
-
Thanks again for the response, EGOL. It is appreciated.
Can you point to any examples of large-scale sites like this with better SEO for these pages? I mean, any site that targets every city, neighborhood, park, etc. with content like this should theoretically run into duplicate content and display thin result pages quite often.
And even so, these pages are helpful. I Google "restaurant + small cities near me" and Yelp pages come up, which benefit me.
Yelp is one of the biggest review sites on the web and their filtered search result pages are indexed and ranking ultra high all over the place. What are they doing so special?
This page and this page both offer nearly the same exact results, just shuffled a bit. Beyond simply being too big to get slapped, why is it okay when Yelp does this?
-
I agree. It is on a very thin line. I believe that Google's Panda algo will eventually hit it. I look at lots of site that people say lost traffic. This one has a similar design and content Style.
-
That's interesting. It seems to have been around for quite a while and ranks well. Of all the similar sites I've seen, Houzz seems to walk the thinnest line on bad-SEO though. Their filter creates nearly identical pages, all of which get indexed, and they have no canonicals for any of them and virtually the same on-page SEO as well. Not to mention the same blurbs across millions of pages, etc.
It's weird to me though that a reasonably targeted blurb is such bad business when the rest of the site is so helpful to users. One would think Google would allow it since the blurbs apply to each page and the "results" are the real meat and potatoes of the site.
-
This site has lots of duplicate content from page to page and lots of thin content on a repeating template. It will be hit by Panda.
-
EGOL,
I think you're making unfair assumptions about our site. Each page visible to Google will have helpful information and content on the site. The one's that don't will not be "published" for Google or our users.
I assure you, the site will be worthwhile and helpful to the end user, especially as time progresses. In fact, if you read above, I am asking specifically about adding additional helpful content to the user, but trying to avoid DC issues by posting it throughout each site.
I am not trying to shortcut anything, I'm curious why some sites are able to seemingly circumvent SEO tenets and was hoping for a helpful discussion.
And again, I'll reiterate, I am not interested in boilerplate content to shortcut anything. It would be in addition to existing useful content. The boilerplate content on similar pages would also be beneficial to the end user. Using the examples above, I believe the small blurbs above _can _be helpful to the user. Do you agree?
Thanks for the response.
-
The problem that you face is that you are trying to make a website with millions of pages for which you do not have adequate content. You are trying to take shortcuts by using a cookiecutter instead of doing the work to make a worthy and unique website.
If you continue with your current business plan, I believe that Google will not treat your site very well. These sites used to work in Google over ten years ago and at that time they were ingenious. Today they are spam.
-
The paragraph of helpful content is identical (beyond a city being swapped out) but it still helps their searches. If you tailor a search with one of their cities and a cousin keyword within the text, they pop-up on the front page usually. That's what I'm asking about. Why is Google ignoring this obvious DC?
I'm assuming the business listings are making the page unique enough to override the duplicate paragraph + the site is huge and has TONS of authority.
-
They're not identical, and I notice many directories are set-up like this. Two individual users with different interests would find unique information from both of these samples. The only issue is how your competition has setup their page. For instance, if someone is just targeting Phoenix, and really goes to town with unique information and links, that may rank better because they may be views as more of an authority on the subject.
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
-
What to do with dynamically translated content sharing same urls?
We've just added to an originally English website, Italian and German translations. User can switch between them with right hand drop down language selection menu; then the entire page will be translated (including menu, body, footer) but the urls remain the same. The Italian page have some meta data (titles and descriptions) translated as well. Is it going to be a significantly negative effect on SEO to have the translated pages sharing the same urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D2i0 -
Http vs. https - duplicate content
Hi I have recently come across a new issue on our site, where https & http titles are showing as duplicate. I read https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https however, am wondering as https is now a ranking factor, blocked this can't be a good thing? We aren't in a position to roll out https everywhere, so what would be the best thing to do next? I thought about implementing canonicals? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
A lot of news / Duplicate Content - what to do?
Hi All, I have a blog with a lot of content (news and pr messages), I want to move my blog to new domain. What is your recommendation? 1. Keep it as is. old articles -> 301 -> same article different URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
2. Remove all the duplicate content and create 301 from the old URL to my homepage.
3. Keep it as is, but add in the meta-tags NoIndex in duplicate articles. Thanks !0 -
Is un-searched content worth writing?
Hi, Is every post you write on your site is SERPs worthy? I'll give an example -
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
We often cover industry related news items. It is written very well with personal opinions, comments and detailed explanations. Our readers find it interesting, "like" and "plus" it. However, these items will never appear in the SERPs simply because they won't be searched. Needless to say that these are not ever green pieces. If by chance it lands a subject that may be searched in the future, usually it won't appear because it means that the item was also covered by major sites like CNN, Forbes, Bloomberg etc. Is it worth out time to keep "investing" in these types of articles? Thanks0 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Opinion on Duplicate Content Scenario
So there are 2 pest control companies owned by the same person - Sovereign and Southern. (The two companies serve different markets) They have two different website URLs, but the website code is actually all the same....the code is hosted in one place....it just uses an if/else structure with dynamic php which determines whether the user sees the Sovereign site or the Southern site....know what I am saying? Here are the two sites: www.sovereignpestcontrol.com and www.southernpestcontrol.com. This is a duplicate content SEO nightmare, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MeridianGroup0 -
Ad units or % of ads vs content?
When looking at content "above the fold" is it more important to look at ad units or the visual % of unique content to ads? For example, if there are 6 small ad units or one large ad unit that takes up 30% of the page, which is better for search engines? In general, is 50% unique content above the fold with 50% ads adequate or what % do you try to optimize for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0