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
-
Republishing blog content on LinkedIn and Medium
Hi Mozzers, I'm thinking republishing content from my own website's blog on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium. These sites are able to reach a far bigger (relevant) audience than I can through my own website, so there's strategic reasoning for doing this. However, with SEO being a key activity on my own website, I don't want to be at risk of any penalties for duplicate content. However, I've just read this on Search Engine Journal: "there is confirmation from Google... Gary Illyes has stated that republishing articles won’t cause a penalty, and that it’s simply a filter they use when evaluating sites. Most sites are only penalized for duplicate content if the site is 100% copied content." So, what do people think - is republishing blog content, on LinkedIn and Medium safe? And is it a sound tactic to increase reach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zoope0 -
Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add. Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content? Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet. We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases. I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlfredPennyworth0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains
Hi All, The structure of the main website goes by http://abc.com/state/city/publication - We have a partnership with public libraries to give local users access to the publication content for free. We have over 100 subdomains (each for an specific library) that have duplicate content issues with the root domain, Most subdomains have very high page authority (the main public library and other local .gov websites have links to this subdomains).Currently this subdomains are not index due to the robots text file excluding bots from crawling. I am in the process of setting canonical tags on each subdomain and open the robots text file. Should I set the canonical tag on each subdomain (homepage) to the root domain version or to the specific city within the root domain? Example 1:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NewspaperArchive
Option 1: http://covina.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/california/covina/
Option 2: http://covina.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ Example 2:
Option 1: http://galveston.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/texas/galveston/
Option 2: http://galveston.abc.com = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ Example 3:
Option 1: http://hutchnews.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/kansas/hutchinson/
Option 2: http://hutchnews.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ I believe it makes more sense to set the canonical tag to the corresponding city (option 1), but wondering if setting the canonical tag to the root domain will pass "some link juice" to the root domain and it will be more beneficial. Thanks!0 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks ZCJDa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Keyword/Content Consistency
My question is: If you have a keyword that is searched more when it's spelled wrong then when it's spelled right - what do you do? Do you do the misspelled word or keep true to the spelling and say oh well to SEO? Also - Along the same lines of that question: What if you have a keyword that has a - in the middle of it. For instance: website and web-site (this isn't the keyword just an example). and drupal website is searched more then drupal web-site but wordpress web-site is searched more then wordpress website. Technically website is the correct spelling and way to write it, but people put web-site (again not the case in reality - just an example).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0 -
Fixing Duplicate Content Errors
SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0