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
-
Content change and variations in ranking
Hello, I have create a new webpage and asked google in the webmaster tool to crawl it. Within minutes it is ranked at a certain spot. I did make changes to it to increase the ranking and right away I could see variations in ranking either up or down ? I have done the same same thing for a page that has been existing on my website for many years. I changed the content, asked the webmaster tool to re-crawl it. It got the new content within minutes but the ranking doesn't seem to change. Maybe my content isn't good enough but I doubt. Could it be that on old pages it takes a couple weeks to see ranking changes whereas on new page it is instantaneous. Has anyone experienced something similar ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Supplier Videos & Duplicate Content
Hi, We have some supplier videos the product management want to include on these product pages. I am wondering how detrimental this is for SEO & the best way to approach this. Do we simply embed the supplier YouTube videos, or do we upload them to our YouTube - referencing the original content & then embed our YouTube videos? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Where to learn how best to promote content?
So now I created some really good content (with help of Egol and Peter here on moz.com) and now I need to promote it. To get it in front of authoritative sites so they hopefully will write about and link to it. I erroneously figured it would be fairly easy. I contacted two writers of a high level industry blog/magazine that previously had mentioned us in press, sent them an email with an invitation to check it out and please let me know what they thought. NO response. They probably get deluged. Anyway, I can't afford to pay a marketing company to promote it. Where can I learn how to best do this myself? The content isn't going to help anyone if no one sees it.... Thanks for any leads! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers1 -
An Unfair Content related penalty :(
Hi Guys, Google.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrodb
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/ We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time. Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT. Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup. Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised. We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again. From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is. Thanks and really appreciate it.0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Press Release and Duplicate Content
Hello folks, We have been using Press Releases to promote our clients business for a couple of years and we have seen great results in referral traffic and SEO wise. Recently one of our clients requested us to publish the PR on their website as well as blast it out using PRWeb and Marketwire. I think that this is not going to be a duplicate content issue for our client's website since I believe that Google can recognize which content has been published first, but I will be more than happy to get some of the Moz community opinions. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aviatech0