Duplicate content issues, I am running into challenges and am looking for suggestions for solutions. Please help.
-
So I have a number of pages on my real estate site that display the same listings, even when parsed down by specific features and don't want these to come across as duplicate content pages. Here are a few examples:
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html?feature=waterfront
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html
This happens to be a waterfront community so all the homes are located along the waterfront. I can use a canonical tag, but I not every community is like this and I want the parsed down feature pages to get index.
Here is another example that is a little different:
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=without-pool
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=4-bedrooms
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=waterfront
So all the listings in this community happen to have 4 bedrooms, no pool, and are waterfront. Meaning that they display for each of the parsed down categories. I can possible set something that if the listings = same then use canonical of main page url, but in the next case its not so simple.
So in this next neighborhood there are 48 total listings as seen at:
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/windermere/isleworth.html
and being that it is a higher end neighborhood, 47 of the 48 listings are considered "traditional listings" and while it is not exactly all of them it is 99%.
Any recommendations is appreciated greatly.
-
Endorsing Jared for the full thread/follow-up. Unfortunately, when it comes to indexing all of these pages, you can't really have your cake and eat it too in 2012. These pages do look thin to Google - honestly, when the results don't change (and I get that that's just because the filters don't always impact the search), then it starts to look like you're just spinning out duplicates to target new keywords in the header. At high volume, that could get you into trouble (and is the kind of thing Panda has targeted).
You're right, though, if you canonical these pages, they won't get indexed and ranked. These days, my gut reaction is that the trade-off is worth it. If you focus your ranking power, the core category/neighborhood/etc. pages will get more authority, you'll reduce the risks of thin content, and you'll land search users on core pages that they can use to navigate to the options they want.
There's no solution that doesn't involve a trade-off, but I think focusing your index would be a positive trade-off. Keep in mind, too, that Google isn't really that fond of search pages - ultimately, you want them indexing the core property listings. The key is to have clear paths to those listings and to index and ranking prominent category pages. If you try to rank for every variations of ever search/sort/etc., you'll just end up diluting your ranking ability in most cases.
-
I see, and yes it will.
I know for my real estate clients, the main listings page usually ranks naturally for info that is found in listings so for example "4 bedrooms" - we have a real estate client that ranks for "x real estate" and "x homes for sale" but also ranks for "4 bedroom homes for sale in x" simply because the listings summary have number of bedrooms in them (like yours does).
However for other variables, like "no pool", its gets trickier since no one lists a house on MLS citing "no pool".
The only two ways around this are: write unique content on every main page, and include the keywords you want like 'no pool' or
write some unique content for each variable - ie write some unique copy on the "no pool" page, write some unique copy on the 'waterfront' page, etc. Even then you are still running a risk of duplicate copy. Having the titles, breadcrumbs and h1's dynamically change just might not be enough. I would put all of my efforts (including linkbuilding) to the main landing page and just make sure to include the keywords i want (thats just an opinion).
What is the data showing now - are you being penalized? Are you ranking for any "without pool" or "waterfront" terms and if so, are they getting traffic?
-
First, thanks again for responding. The challenge I have with using the canonical tag for the variable pages is that, won't it prevent google from indexing the variable pages that include some terms/ phrases I am trying to rank for?
Like Hanover Woods foreclosure homes for sale or Hanover 4 bedroom homes for sale
-
Hi Joshua,
There are a number of ways to stop Google from counting your dynamic urls as duplicates. Its unclear from your question why you can't use canonical tags for this. If you went here:
http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html
And add the canonical tag in the HEAD section:
It will solve your issue of duplication when people choose property variables like waterfront or bedroom #. I think you were trying to point out the reason this wont work at the end of your question but Im not exactly sure what you are eluding to there?
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
-
Moz Crawl Diagnostic shows lots of duplicate content issues
Hi my client's website uses URL with www and without www. In page/title both website shows up. The one with www has page authority of 51 and the one without 45. In Moz diagnostic I can see that the website shows over 200 duplicate content which are not found in , e.g. Webmaster. When I check each page and add/remove www then the website shows the same content for both www and no www. It is not redirect - in search tab it actually shows www and then if you use no www it doesn't show www. Is the www issue to blame? or could it be something else? and what do I do since both www URL and no-www URL have high authority, just set up redirect from lower authority URL to higher authority URL?
Technical SEO | | GardenPet0 -
Why are some pages now duplicate content?
It is probably a silly question, but all of a sudden, the following pages of one of my clients are reported as Duplicate content. I cannot understand why. They weren't before... http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal
Technical SEO | | MarketingEnergy
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma Thanks for any help in the right direction 🙂 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| | <colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 17225; width: 353pt;" width="471"></colgroup>
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma |0 -
Image centric site and duplicate content issues
We have a site that has very little text, the main purpose of the site is to allow users to find inspiration through images. 1000s of images come to us each week to be processed by our editorial team, so as part of our process we select a subset of the best images and process those with titles, alt text, tags, etc. We still host the other images and users can find them through galleries that link to the process and unprocessed image pages. Due to the lack of information on the unprocessed images, we are having lots of duplicate content issues (The layout of all the image pages are the same, and there isn't any unique text to differentiate the pages. The only changing factor is the image itself in each page) Any suggestions on how to resolve this issue, will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | wedlinkmedia0 -
Advice on Duplicate Page Content
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them. For example - http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
Technical SEO | | jsmoz
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs We have many such pages. Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?0 -
Issue Duplicate Page Title
I'm having some really strange issues with duplicate page titles and I can't seem to figure out what's going on. I just got a new crawl from SEOMOZ and it's showing some duplicate page titles. http://www.example.com/blog/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/2/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/3/ Repeat .............. I have no idea what's going on, how these were duplicated, or how to correct it. Does anyone have a chance to take a look and see if you can figure out what's happening and what I need to do to correct the errors? I'm using Wordpress and all in one SEO plugin. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Duplicate content
I'm getting an error showing that two separate pages have duplicate content. The pages are: | Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Registrar Register4Less, Inc. http://register4less.com/faq/cache/11.html 1 27 1 Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Register4Less Reseller (Tucows) http://register4less.com/faq/cache/7.html | These are both registration agreements, one for us (Register4Less, Inc.) as the registrar, and one for Tucows as the registrar. The pages are largely the same, but are in fact different. Is there a way to flag these pages as not being duplicate content? Thanks, Doug.
Technical SEO | | R4L0 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Please help....
Hi Guys! Ok a bit of a funny one here which is causing a confusion between us and a web designer and I was wondering if anyone on here might be able to help. Just a bit of back ground for you, the website has been built on Concrete 5 and when we tried to building a sitemap we found over 110,000 pages. When we spoke to the web designer they have told us that within Google webmaster tools, Google has only indexed 58. But.... (and this is where things get a little confusing, so bare with me.) I thought that cant be right so into the Google search bar I put in site:www.sitename.co.uk and had 217 results appear. So google cant have just 58 pages indexed, right? So after speaking to the designer he then posted on the Concrete 5 help forum, to try and help figure it out. I have posted his exact forum post below that the web designer has asked: I'm having some issues where a site we are working on seems to be making multiple pages going to the same page. An SEO specialist has run a report and found a number of duplicate pages created by C5. We are concerned that this is going to dilute or worse penalise the way google sees the site. http://www.sitename.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID... Is there a way of stopping google from accessing these duplicate 'cID' pages and stop them being made? Also is there a way of getting rid of the ones that are there? We've done a number of sites in C5 and are beginning to get concerned about this... So I guess my question is: If I can access the same content via 4-5 different cID's is that classed as duplicate content? Thanks in advance guys, and any help would greatly appreciated. 🙂0