Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
-
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in.
They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area.
I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue.
So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages).
Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
-
Hi James,
The way this was done is not good, but the idea is right. If the client has 14 different offices, it is a standard best practice to create a unique page for each of them, and, yes, that means unique content. too. Rather than dealing with re-directs and rels, my advice is to reconsider your stance on creating meaningful content for each page. You just need to find a unique story to tell for each page. If the client is a service business, then doubtless, he's got a unique story from each service area to share. Put a minimum of 400 engaging words together, put the complete NAP(name, address, phone), a map of the service area, 5-10 local testimonials, maybe a video of the client at work in the local area and, bingo, you've now got a strong page that's been locally optimized for the community it serves.
Are you sure this isn't an option? It will take some effort/funding, but the business needs to understand the importance of taking a high quality approach to presenting themselves on the web, or they are going to be overrun by competitors who are willing to make these efforts.
-
Hi James,
you in fact come up with the answer I would have suggested.
One thing to think about is the purpose of why these pages come into existence and why it was a tactic 10+ years ago...
The reason I would think is.. keywords.
Croydon Lift Repair
Essex Lift Repair
London Lift Repair
....Depending on the clients website and using my example service, if they happened to have a very strong presence for the keyword lift repair, then you probably could easily incorporate those longer keywords London Lift Repair onto the main lift repair page and simply canonical the subpages.
If they don't have a strong presence on the root keyword (lift repair) but do show good results for the longer keyword results (London Lift Repair), then all you have to really worry about is 14 pages of content. Which in the scheme of a website is not that much.
I would think that it would be a good idea to include, content, physical address's phone numbers, map results on this page. Also if possible, contact some of the clients and ask them if it is okay get their opinion and thoughts on the service that was provided and use that as "What Others Are Saying". section on these pages. If they are hesitant maybe offer their business a free follow link, which could sway them in the right direction. From there you could talk about the unique things about each branch, could be employees, service equipment, local community involvements, clients, high profile contracts etc...)
The short is you're on the right track and I hope my thoughts helped you get on.
Don
-
Re-reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
I don't think I have any choice except to use rel=canonical tags and work at improving page content. Adapting this question to ask the speculative "how much does duplicate content hurt my ranking"
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
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?
I am working with a company that sells high-priced automobiles. Each Unit has its own URL We currently leave most sold inventory live on the site as it draws in many leads (the units are visually shown as sold, so it shouldn't be a UX issue in most cases). We are wanting to start pruning some old units (this is in WordPress - custom post type) and I'm not quite sure what the best solution for this site is with removed units. Some ideas: Remove the units pages that are no longer needed, resulting in any links 404'ing to a useful 404 page. Remove the units pages, and 301 them to the Homepage (I don't really want to do this, as it seems like really poor UX) Remove the units page, and 301 the user to a specific "This item has sold" page that is shared by all sold units, but may not be the sites full 404. another option I haven't thought of? I dont' want to do anything that would confuse or get search engines upset, and I'm not sure how bad 404's are, I see some info on how bad they are, some that say they aren't bad. I'm guessing it is as usual, some gray area in the middle.
On-Page Optimization | | Andy_Staple0 -
What to do about resellers duplicating content?
Just went through a big redevelopment for a client and now have fresh images and updated content but now all the resellers have just grabbed the new images/content and pasted them on their own site. My client is a manufacture that sells directly online and over the phone for large orders. I'm just not sure how to handle the resellers duplicate content. Any thoughts on this? Am I being silly for worrying about this?
On-Page Optimization | | ericnkatz0 -
Tool To Search For Duplicate Content
Hi Is there such a tool that can be use to search a website for duplicate content? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Bossandy0 -
Mass Duplicate Content
Hi guys Now that the full crawl is complete I've found the following: http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-onslow-02022 http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-moora-01816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=1816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=2022 The first 2 duplicate content is easily fixed by writing better product descriptions for each product (a lot of hours needed) but still an easy fix. The last 2 are review pages for each product which are all the same except for the main h1 text. My thinking is to add no index and no follow to all of these review pages? The site will be changing to magento very soon and theres still a lot of work to do. If anyone has any other suggestions or can spot any other issues, its appreciated. Kind regards Robert
On-Page Optimization | | yournetbiz1 -
What is the right schema.org link for a web design / developer / mobile agency?
It seems strange that a group of web developers would make up an entire structured language to designate businesses by category and somehow forget to include companies like.... web developers. So I must be missing it, what is correct to use?
On-Page Optimization | | yeagerd0 -
Static content VS Dynamic changing content
We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages. We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews. Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed? We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
For duplicate page content, how different should pages be? For example, I have seven locations and on each location page, we offer a discount. The discounts are the same currently and open into a pop-up window. So it looks something like this: mysite.com/locationA/dicount mysite.com/locationB/discount mysite.com/locationX/discount The pages are identical. Should I change the verbiage on each page or let it be? I noticed that our organic search rankings have dropped since our site upgrade and this is one item that SEOMOZ has noted. Thanks! DHO
On-Page Optimization | | DougHoltOnline0