Online household calculator for utility company - SEO thin content issue
-
Hi - I'm working with a utility company that's produced a calculator for individual households.
When you go to their website and type in your address, various household info is pulled across (from various databases) and a calculation is generated on electricity costs/savings per month - the only unique content on each page = numbers. Beyond that, the content on each page is a template.
There is actually a unique URL for each household (when you click on your property name a unique results page is generated).
I'm worried about thin content penalties - is the best option to nofollow noindex these individual household pages (99% of the site!)???
-
Thanks for your input Andy - some good commonsense there Luke
-
Thanks for that superb contribution, Don - helpful beyond words for me, because I've never worked with such a site before - hugely appreciated - Luke
-
HI Luke,
Having dealt with unique but thin content in the past, there are a couple things that come to mind.
First we would start by understanding the goal of this tool. Yes, some people make handy tools for themselves or friends or just to see if they can do it (I made a site that tracks the heat/frequency of Ohio Keno numbers), but usually the purpose is to generate brand recognition or customers; ultimately meaning money.
Once we know the goal of the page we can now move onto how we can use SEO best practice to achieve this goal.
I see two viable options here. The first would be to focus the page on a broad term like "energy comparisons" and possibly throw in the areas that are serviced for localization purposes. To do this you would build the page based on this broad term detail the tool, the use, add videos, help files, pdfs, reports and then rel=canonical the generated URLs back to the main page.
The second option would be to go aggressive and not only target the main page for the broad terms and areas but also target the long tail address's for energy comparisons.
Examples:
- 120 White Elk Lane Energy Use
- 120 White Elk Lane Average Energy Cost
- 120 White Elk Lane Energy Rates
To do this you would have to add more dynamic elements to the code that returns results. That maybe difficult or it maybe extremely easy if the database has more information.
I could easily in-vision this tool returning X rate vs. Y vs. Z company rates, but also returning neighbor's rates 122 White Elk Lane, 123 White Elk Lane, Average Block Rates, Average Community Rates, and compare them to the entered address, adding charts, rate trends, and maps will all be a boon to make the content for 120 White Elk Lane's page be unique. This method removes the thin content and adds tremendous value to anybody looking at buying or selling a home.. just imagine how many real estate companies would link to this page to help sell their listings!
In short you can take one of two approaches, target the broad keywords on the main tool page and canonical the generated urls back to the main page, or add in some dynamic but very helpful content to make the urls unique. You could also start by using the first approach while building the code for the second approach, once finished just remove the canonicals and let the pages rank.
My thoughts and I really hope this helps,
Don
-
It certainly sounds like it Luke. If there is nothing there that is content-worthy, then it 'could' cause issues. I always ask my clients to imagine they are Google and "what would you think if you visited that page to look for great quality content that they should index and share with others".
-Andy
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
-
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Negative SEO + Disavow
My site is very new (~1 years old), but due to good PR we have gotten some decent links and are already ranking for a key term. This may be why someone decided to start a negative SEO attack on us. We've had less than 200 linking domains up until 2 weeks ago, but since then we have been getting 100+ new domains /day with anchor texts that are either targeted to that key term or are from porn websites. I've gone through the links to get ready and submit a disavow... but should I do it? My rankings/site traffic has not been affected yet. Reasons for my hesitations: 1. Google always warns against using the disavow, and says "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website." (sensing 'guilty-until-proven') 2. Some say Google is only trying to get the data to see if there are any patterns within the linking sites. I don't want the site owners to get hurt, since the villain is someone else using xrumer to put spammy comments on their site. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ALLee0 -
Wordpress and duplicate content
Hi, I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc. How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Blog Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs. Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice? Thanks Mozzers! Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
SEO-Friendly Method to Load XML Content onto Page
I have a client who has about 100 portfolio entries, each with its own HTML page. Those pages aren't getting indexed because of the way the main portfolio menu page works: It uses javascript to load the list of portfolio entries from an XML file along with metadata about each entry. Because it uses javascript, crawlers aren't seeing anything on the portfolio menu page. Here's a sample of the javascript used, this is one of many more lines of code: // load project xml try{ var req = new Request({ method: 'get', url: '/data/projects.xml', Normally I'd have them just manually add entries to the portfolio menu page, but part of the metadata that's getting loaded is project characteristics that are used to filter which portfolio entries are shown on page, such as client type (government, education, industrial, residential, industrial, etc.) and project type (depending on type of service that was provided). It's similar to filtering you'd see on an e-commerce site. This has to stay, so the page needs to remain dynamic. I'm trying to summarize the alternate methods they could use to load that content onto the page instead of javascript (I assume that server side solutions are the only ones I'd want, unless there's another option I'm unaware of). I'm aware that PHP could probably load all of their portfolio entries in the XML file on the server side. I'd like to get some recommendations on other possible solutions. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaneJamison0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
SEO for Global Navigations
I did my first SEO audit from the book SEO Secrets by Danny Dover on my new website at http://melo4.melotec.com:4010/ In the book he says to disable Javascript and see if the global navigation still works. So when I did that the dropdown menus in my navigation don't show. I'm assuming this is a problem but when I check the cache text only version of the site, the dropdowns are in the text only version. Are their any experienced SEO's out their who can weigh in on this issue? Should I have my developer redo the navigation without any javascript? Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0