Home Page Blog Snippets - Duplicate Content Help?
-
Afternoon Folks-
I have been asked to contribute to a new site that has a blogfeed prominently displayed on the home page. It's laid out like this:
Logo | Menu
HOME PAGE SLIDER
Blog 1 Title
- about 100 words of blog 1 Text
Blog 2 Title
- about 100 words of blog 2 Text
Blog 3 Title
- about 100 words of blog 3 Text
Footer:
--
This seems like an obvious duplicate content situation but also a way I have seen a lot of blogs laid out. (I.E. With blog content snippets being a significant portion of the home page content)
I want the blogs to rank and I want the home page to rank, so I don't feel like a rel canonical on the blog post's is the correct option unless I have misunderstood their purpose.
Anyone have any ideas or know how this is usually handled?
-
It depends a bit on the topics you're discussing. For most sites, it's very difficult to get ranked on your homepage apart when people are looking for your brandname. If your site is mainly covering one topic - and all the blog post on your site are giving additional info on that specific topic or closely related topic it might work.
I would only add additional content on the homepage if it's adding value for the users - it's not really something which is needed for Google (example; when I search for "sports car" on google.co.uk - one of the top results is http://www.classicandsportscar.com/ - which has more or less the same setup as you describe = slider +links to other articles - no specific 'homepage' content)
-
CRO,
Clarity is happening now! When you say blog-feed, you're referring to original blogs actually on the site. NOT a blog-feed showing articles syndicated from some other site. That's a good thing, as I think those links (to your internal articles) will help your ensure those posts get indexed quickly, and might get some link juice too.
While I always think some original introductory content on the homepage is a good thing, now that I understand the blog-feed is to original articles on your actual blog, I won't worry much about where it is on the homepage. I'd simply put the original homepage content anywhere that is feels good for you and the end user.
--A
-
Yep, all internal blog posts and the blogs are 400 - 1000 + words, so that should be covered as well. Thanks for the advice though, I hadn't heard the warning about smaller blog posts.
-
Thanks Anthony -
The content is solid and the posts are all original, so we should be square there.
So maybe a next step option would be to add Original, home page only, content between the slider and the Blog Feed?
For Example:
Logo | Menu
HOME PAGE SLIDER
ADD ORIGINAL HOME PAGE CONTENT
Blog 1 Title
- about 100 words of blog 1 Text
Blog 2 Title
- about 100 words of blog 2 Text
Blog 3 Title
- about 100 words of blog 3 Text
Footer:
--
-
This seems like a pretty normal set-up, and there should not be any need to use canonicals in this case. Just one thing - although there is no such thing as an ideal number of words for a blog item, if your show 100 words of blog 1 on the home, and blog1 only has 120 words in total - it's probably not the best set-up (not for Google, and not for the users, as they would need to click to get only a little bit of additional information)
Update - I assume that blog1/blog2/etc are blog posts written on your site - if they are external blogs this page has little value
-
A blogfeed should be okay, meaning that the site won't be penalized for having it. But the feed's not going to help SEO, either. That blog really needs you to start writing some high-quality unique content ASAP if they want the search engines to rank their site. Also, they should put your good original content at the top, above the fold, and start making the blogfeed a feature of lesser prominence. You're going to want google to see the good/original content first
--Hope this helps!
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
-
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello guys, After fixing the rel tag on similar pages on the site I thought that duplicate content issue were resolved. I checked HTML Improvements on GWT and instead of going down as I expected, it went up. The duplicate issues affect identical product pages which differ from each other just for one detail, let's say length or colour. I could write different meta tags as the duplicate is the meta description, and I did it for some products but still didn't have any effects and they are still showing as duplicates. What would the problem be? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Tips and duplicate content
Hello, we have a search site that offers tips to help with search/find. These tips are organized on the site in xml format with commas... of course the search parameters are duplicated in the xml so that we have a number of tips for each search parameter. For example if the parameter is "dining room" we might have 35 pieces of advice - all less than a tweet long. My question - will I be penalized for keyword stuffing - how can I avoid this?
Technical SEO | | acraigi0 -
Need help with home page on site
Hello! Thanks for reading in advance! I've got a relatively old site (12 year old domain) that has experienced a drop in rankings specifically for our home page. Some of the key terms that I'd assume we would rank well for are: "expedite us passport" According to SEOMOZ, our on page optimization receives a C for the termr. also, the root domain and page have decent links, etc. However; looking at Google (logged out and in incognito mode in chrome), a page on our site http://www.passportsandvisas.com/passport/index.asp ranks well and our HOME page isn't listed in the top 50 or 100. THis is the case for a lot of keywords we used to rank well for. I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page. Any thoughts would be very, very helpful!
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Mitigating duplicate page content on dynamic sites such as social networks and blogs.
Hello, I recently did an SEOMoz crawl for a client site. As it typical, the most common errors were duplicate page title and duplicate content. The client site is a custom social network for researchers. Most of the pages that showing as duplicate are simple variations of each user's profile such as comment sections, friends pages, and events. So my question is how can we limit duplicate content errors for a complex site like this. I already know about the rel canonical tag, and rel next tag, but I'm not sure if either of these will do the job. Also, I don't want to lose potential links/link juice for good pages. Are there ways of using the "noindex" tag in batches? For instance: noindex all urls containing this character? Or do most CMS allow this to be done systematically? Anyone with experience doing SEO for a custom Social Network or Forum, please advise. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10