Duplicate Content... Really?
-
Hi all,
My site is www.actronics.eu
Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!.
I know why.
Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar.
There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model.
Here's an example:
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report).
I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others?
So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number.
One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php)Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanks,
Woody -
Hey David
Thanks for reply.
3. Use a plugin to apply rich snippet markup to the individual product pages, adding another layer of "uniqueness"
I had thought about this already and was looking into the MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) attribute for products (https://schema.org/mpn) however, it's not clear if, like SKU, the MPN needs to be unique to ProductModel (https://schema.org/ProductModel)?
If that were the case, I'd have a problem as there are multiple MPN's per ProductModel.
I see https://schema.org/isVariantOf too, which could be useful?
Anyone with experience of Schema?
-
First, why were you looking at the reports? Have you seen some type of ranking loss that you are trying to remedy?
Second, the moz tools are just tools to provide you with an oversight on where you are at, and potential areas your site can be improved. They work, but are not dedicated to any one type of website i.e. e-commerce vs static or content-based.
To get the unique pages you seek, it may be possible to use javascript to load content for variables of part numbers. As stated before, your site is getting seen as duplicate due to only a few things changing out per page.
Possible fixes:
1. Use dynamic coding to load part number variables, such as drop down menus for alternate versions or parts or models. This will allow you fewer pages to direct your backlinks to as well.2. Have more top level pages based around the category, and focus on getting the category pages ranking rather than the individual part pages. Again, focus your backlinking efforts on these pages.
3. Use a plugin to apply rich snippet markup to the individual product pages, adding another layer of "uniqueness"
-
The pages were not intended strictly for SEO value, they were mainly built for user value, i.e. returning a 100% focused page on the part number they searched for. Remember, many people use Google as a navigational tool and they also consider the product to the the part no. they searched for, not the main manufacturer of the product (ATE).
I understand what you are saying though and think building stronger product pages is the way to go, although I will try on a subset of pages and monitor results.
Now to decide which approach to take to yield the best results:
a.) SEO focus on ATE MK70 (list all the vehicle makes/models/years this product work on, including list of part numbers)
or...
b.) SEO focus on vehicle makes/model (then list all the manufacturers of suitable products, with corresponding part numbers)Thanks,
Woody -
This is one of the things Panda was trying to discourage (creating pages strictly for SEO value as opposed to user value that have thin content).
Consolidating and building out a single page is the way to go. Google will still crawl the product numbers, and they will be on a much stronger page. Even if they're not in the URL and title, a more valuable page nearly always wins out.
Not only that, you're playing with fire right now. If you haven't been hit by Panda yet, your odds are much higher with the numerous little pages.
-
Thanks guys
William
What's the thought process of creating a bunch of new pages, even though it's the same product, just referred to differently by different companies? Just for the unique URLs and titles?
Samuel
Would you want to create a separate page for "red Honda Civic," "green Honda civic," and countless other colors? Of course not.
To hopefully address both questions with one answer; the reason for building separate pages was to give SEO focus to the unique part numbers and the product type by vehicle make / model / year.
Very few people in the industry search for the product by name, it's always by part number. In fact, I'd go as far as to say there's few who would actually know the brand of "the product", that being ATE MK70 in our example above.
I understand the logic of building a strong single product page with all these part numbers listed, but would this page really rank well for searches on part number? Bear in mind, unlike the red, green, blue Honda Civic example, where there's perhaps a dozen different colours, we're talking literally 100's of part numbers per product and variations of it's formatting.
I welcome further conversation and ideas on this
Thanks so far guys! -
Thanks for the question. I'm not able to go through your site at the moment, but I would ask: Do you really need a separate page for every single make, model, and part number? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be what you're doing. If so, you're just asking for a Panda penalty.
Here's a basic example: Say that you sell Honda Civics. Would you want to create a separate page for "red Honda Civic," "green Honda civic," and countless other colors? Of course not. All of the content would be entirely the same except for the listed color throughout each title and page's text.
I'd take a look at Amazon as an example. Say that I go to a page for a certain T-shirt. The same page for that individual product will include all of the color variations w_ithin that single product page_. Each color variation is not a new page and URL (or if it is, it has a rel=canonical tag back to the main product page -- I don't remember). I'd look to this example as a way that you can vastly cut down the number of product pages so that each one is truly unique, valuable, and useful to both search engines and customers.
I hope that helps -- good luck!
-
I think you're already in Panda territory. The content can't get much thinner. It seems like all those sub-pages that are linked to on the page you just shared are unnecessary, no? Couldn't you just have the one page, build it out with the cars it works in, maybe a diagram or instruction on how to put it in, and make a really valuable page?
What's the thought process of creating a bunch of new pages, even though it's the same product, just referred to differently by different companies? Just for the unique URLs and titles?
Consolidating all of that would eliminate thin content and likely strengthen your landing page exponentially.
-
Thank you for your answer William and taking the time to respond,
I understand what you are saying but I am a little skeptical as that being a logical/achievable solution?
Let's say we did write some content for each product, the content would be "thin" to say the least.
As an example, we have over 700 products (per language), this being on of them - http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/product/ate-mk70
This product alone works in over 43 different vehicle marques, illustrated in the list of on the page.
The only thing different about them is the part number, i.e. what the manufacturer refers to this part as (Audi A3 refer to it as 10097003153, Peugeot 206 refer to it as 9659136980). There really is nothing more to say about the product, without creating more dupe content and getting into Panda territory, so I don't see this being a viable solution?
We have the pages in place as mechanics/garages search by manufactures number, not product type.
Any more thoughts/ideas?
-
This issue isn't duplicate content, Moz is just flagging it as that because of the severe lack of content, making the footer, sidebar, etc. the majority of the content on the page. This is not good, and the best way to remedy it would be to build out more content.
I realize with roughly 14k pages, this isn't realistic to do for every single page, but you could prioritize. What are your most popular products? Start with those and build out content to make sure they rank and perform as well as possible, and then continue to go down the list as you have time to do so, manually optimizing and building out the most profitable/popular pages first.
When it comes to unique content, there is no automated solution. Either you write stuff, hire someone else to write stuff, or do what a lot of places do: implements a review system for customers to use and crowd-source the unique content that way.
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
-
Duplicate content across different domains in different countries?
Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
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 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Parameter Strings & Duplicate Page Content
I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs. Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools. We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site? I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Proper Hosting Setup to Avoid Subfolders & Duplicate Content
I've noticed with hosting multiple websites on a single account you end up having your main site in the root public_html folder, but when you create subfolders for new website it actually creates a duplicate website: eg. http://kohnmeat.com/ is being hosted on laubeau.com's server. So you end up with a duplicate website: http://laubeau.com/kohn/ Anyone know the best way to prevent this from happening? (i.e. canonical? 301? robots.txt?) Also, maybe a specific 'how-to' if you're feeling generous 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
I'm getting a lot of duplicate content errors on my ecommerce site www.outdoormegastore.co.uk mainly centered around product pages. The products are completely different in terms of the title, meta data, product descriptions and images (with alt tags)but SEOmoz is still identifying them as duplicates and we've noticed a significant drop in google ranking lately. Admittedly the product descriptions are a little bit thin but I don't understand why the pages would be viewed as duplicates and therefore can be ranked lower? The content is definitely unique too. As an example these three pages have been identified as being duplicates of each other. http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/regatta-landtrek-25l-rucksack.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/canyon-bryce-adult-cycling-helmet-9045.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/outwell-minnesota-6-carpet-for-green-07-08-tent.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Duplicate content ramifications for country TLDs
We have a .com site here in the US that is ranking well for targeted phrases. The client is expanding its sales force into India and South Africa. They want to duplicate the site entirely, twice. Once for each country. I'm not well-versed in international SEO. Will this cause a duplicate content filter? Would google.co.in and google.co.za look at google.com's index for duplication? Thanks. Long time lurker, first time question poster.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alter_Imaging0