Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
-
Dear Mozzers,
I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this.
http://www.website.co.uk/news
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all)I also have the ability of showing articles by month :
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan)I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet.
I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse.
I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ
I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK
On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49
Thanks
Pete
-
Hi Dirk,
Many thanks for your help. I will look at adding some useful videos to help improve pages , user engagement and time on the site.
Many thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete
Even if you don't make the videos yourself, it still ads value for your visitors if you use videos from Youtube and/or add additional info from suppliers. Engagement & time on site should increase - so indirectly it will have a positive impact on SEO.
It's not really necessary to make the external links nofollow - normally Google advises only to put nofollow on commercial links / links to low quality. Of course, if you are linking to competitors, it's better to put a nofollow (you don't want to reinforce their position).
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hello Dirk,
Many thanks for your advice , you've been very helpful. Some good points. Yes, I read the article regarding the Click to expand" for content. In fact, I've removed this from one of my categories a week ago to see if it did anything to my rankings as a test. I also use tabs on my product pages which I am thinking of combining the product details/descriptions and pricing into the same tab and have that set to be the one default display.
I like the idea about putting some intro text on the top of the page as like you say , customers wouldn't necessarily know what type of pressure washer to choose. This is all very useful so thank you for raising that very valid point. Currently all my content is at the bottom of my pages although the way, the developer has written the site, this content is loaded first as opposed to last as I know that content on top is deemed more important.
I don't have the ability to do my own videos as we are an "affiliate" but I could have embedded links to useful youtube videos done by others on "how to etc "or even manufacturer videos on my product pages /landing pages if that would help with seo although it's not my video ?. It would therefore be outbound links so I guess I would need to noindex follow ? if you think that is correct.
Many thanks Dirk for you assistance. I've learn't some useful things here.
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
I assume that with h tags you mean H1, H2, .. tags? There is not really a need to add these to the links. Adding theme based crosslinks will probably a better strategy.
You could also consider syndicating content - I've seen quite a lot of examples where DIY stores or fertiliser companies created content, both text and video (how to paint the ceiling / how to keep your lawn in top condition / ...) that was distributed on 3rd party sites (with the same topics). Even if the links on these pages are sometimes nofollow - it still creates brand awareness/trust and probably leads/sales as well.
If I take the sample product page - I would however put some intro text at the top of the page. I guess most people who want to hire a tool like a pressure washer have a certain task in their head, but wouldn't directly know which type to choose. I would add a kind of guide at the top of the page (which type of pressure washer do I need) - you have an article about it, but the title is only about the pressure you need ("Pressure washing guide - Which psi do I need?"). Same applies to "Power cleaning techniques using a pressure washer" - people look for "how to use a pressure washer". Videos on how to use these tools are also great (it always seems so easy to use them until you try yourself...).
Apart from the keyword research already mentioned, ask the sales persons in the stores what the typical questions are that people have when they come to the shop - these questions are excellent titles for your articles.
rgds,
Dirk
Also be careful with the hidden text at the bottom (Read more about our Pressure washing services) - in 2013 Matt Cutts indicated that this was ok for SEO (http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-hidden-text-using-expandable-sections-youll-be-in-good-shape-167753) - however end of 2014 John Muller indicated that it's not the best strategy (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html).
-
Hi Dirk,
Thank you very much for taking the time to answer this. A very informative answer and you have raised some useful points. I totally agree with regrouping my news items into logical themes otherwise like you say ,it's not adding any value if the user cannot find easily what they are looking for.
Some great articles links here to , especially the Keyword research in 90 mins I Learn't alot from that. Will look at the others to.
Just quickly , on my second query with regards to my article links on my landing pages , should I be using H tags for the links back to the relevant news items or leave it as it is ?.. Just struggling to get my PR up on my landing pages so trying to everything really to see what works.
Once again , many thanks.
thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
These pages are not really duplicates, but they do not add a lot of value either. For these kind of pages I would use "noindex, follow" attribute. If I look at them, I really have difficulties to imagine for which kind of query these pages could provide a suitable answer.
Each of the articles mentioned in these list seems to contain useful content- but grouping them by date of apparition is not really adding value. If I were you - I would rather try to regroup them in logical themes (Taking care of your lawn / Painting / Maintenance / ...)
Put yourself in the mind of your target audience - they need to solve a certain problem & they probably need one of the products you have for hire. How would they search? What is the info they need? How can you help them? Many of the articles I see on your site are a bit too generic ('How to take care of your lawn in spring'). To be honest - that's a question I would never enter in Google. People are searching for things like "how to get rid of moss in lawn" - your site doesn't really seem to have a specific answer on this topic. It would however be an excellent opportunity to promote your lawn scarifier.
On first sight, it looks that your site has a lot of interesting content, but it's not really organised around themes, doesn't always answer the right question & links in a bit arbitrary way to the e-commerce part.
Try to do some keyword research (nice article here: https://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-in-90-minutes - a lot more resources here: https://moz.com/ugc/category/keyword-research) - to find out how your target audience is searching & optimise your content according to this;
Try to create smart internal linking using topical hubs (I love this WBF of Gianluca : https://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Intentional Duplicate Content - Great UX, Bad for Ranking?
I'll try to keep this as clear and high level as possible. Thank you in advance for any and all help! We're managing a healthcare practice which specializes in neurosurgical treatments. As the practice is rather large, the doctors have several "specialties" in which they focus in, i.e. back surgery, facial surgery, brain surgery, etc. They have a main website (examplepractice.com) which holds ALL of their content on each condition and treatment in which they deal with. So, if someone enters their main homepage they will see conditions and treatments for all the specialties categorized together. However, linked within the main site are "mini-sites" for each specialty (same domain, same site) (examplepractice.com/brain-surgery), but with a different navigation menu to give the illusion of "separate website". These mini-sites are then tailored from a creative, content and UX perspective to THAT specific group of treatments and conditions. Now, anyone who enters this minisite will find information pertaining to only that specialty. The mini-sites are NOT set up as folders, but rather just a system of URLs that we have mapped out to each page. We set up the pages this way to maintain an exclusive feel for the site. Instead of someone drilling into a specific condition and having the menu change, we created the copies. But, because of how this is set up, we now have duplicate content for each treatment and condition child page (one on the main site, one on the minisite). My question (finally) is will this cause a problem in the future? Are we essentially splitting the "juice" between these two pages? Are we making it easier for our competitors to outrank us? We know this layout makes sense from the perspective of a user, but we're unclear how to move forward from a search perspective. Any tips?
Technical SEO | | frankmassanova1 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Masses (5,168 issues found) of Duplicate content.
Hi Mozzers, I have a site that has returned 5,168 issues with duplicate content. Where would you start? I started sorting via High page Authority first the highest being 28 all the way down to 1. I did want to use the rel=canonical tag as the site has many redirects already. The duplicates are caused by various category and cross category pages and search results such as ....page/1?show=2&sort=rand. I was thinking of going down the lines of a URL rewrite and changing the search anyway. Is it work redirecting everything in terms of results versus the effort of changing all the 5,168 issues? Thanks sm
Technical SEO | | Metropolis0 -
Duplicate page content issue needs resolution.
After my last "crawl" report, I received a warning about "duplicate page content". One page was: http://anycompany.com and the other was: http://anycompany.com/home.html How do I correct this so these pages aren't competing with each other or is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JamesSagerser0 -
How can i resolve Duplicate Page Content?
Hello, I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website AutoDreams.it i have found 159 duplicate page content. My problem is that this web site is about car adsso it is easy to create pages with duplicate content and also Car ads are placed byregistered users. How can i resolve this problem? Regards Francesco
Technical SEO | | francesco870 -
Duplicate Page Title
First i had a problem with duplicate title errors, almost every page i had was double because my website linked to both www.funky-lama.com and funky-lama.com I changed this by adding a code to htaccess to redirect everything to www.funky-lama.com, but now my website was crawled again and the errors were actually doubled. all my pages now have duplicate title errors cause of pages like this www.funky-lama.com/160-confetti-gitaar.html funky-lama.com/160-confetti-gitaar.html www.funky-lama.com/1_present-time funky-lama.com/1_present-time
Technical SEO | | funkylama0 -
Duplicate content handling.
Hi all, I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites. You can see an example of the page here: http://tinyurl.com/62wghs5 As you can see the search results are on the right. A majority of these results will also appear on my competitors sites. My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page? Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents visibilty while at the same time increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site. My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage.
Technical SEO | | Mulith0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0