Duplicate content question
-
Hey Mozzers!
I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit.
I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer.
I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue:
-
Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose.
-
Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right.
-
Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site).
Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case?
Thanks in advance for your help.
AK
-
-
@seoelevated Thanks. I see your reasoning. It's also valid.
-
@andykubrin I would like to add that another valid approach is to ignore the "issue". Are all 4 of your form pages currently indexed? If so, then this Moz-reported issue is not necessarily an actual issue. There is no "penalty" for duplicate content like this. The situation we all wish to avoid is for the search engine to choose one of the pages to index, because it sees them all as duplicates, and not necessarily index the one we want or associate with all our desired keywords we've individually targeted per page. But, if all 4 of your pages are currently indexed, and if they rank for the terms that you want, then it would be OK to ignore the issue.
As well, you might think about whether you want these pages to be indexed/rank at all. If your desire is for traffic to go to the service description pages and then flow to the forms, and if the service description pages are the ones which actually are ranking, the issue may not even matter to you. And so again, you might decide to ignore. And that would be a valid choice.
-
Hi @nigel_carr ,
You've pointed the way to a solution.
I offer four services. I have a service description page for each one, with around 300 words on each page and a link to a separate HubSpot form. I use four separate HubSpot forms because that arrangement allows me to tailor the automated responses I send to each person who requests more information on a given service.
So I think the two best options for a solution are:
-
Keep the service descriptions and forms separate, but noindex each individual form
-
Incorporate the forms into the service description pages
The first option provides a neater appearance, but the second option would shorten the visitor's path to the form, so that's probably the better option.
Thank you for your advice.
Regards,
Andy
-
-
Hi Andy
The reason why they are coming up with a duplicate content warning is likely because there is very little content on the pages other than the forms.
You have a couple of options:
- Flesh out the content on the pages so that the subject is clearly defined in each case. This would involve writing 300+ words/adding an image+alt/H1/Meta etc on the subjects of:
Content Marketing Consultation
Copywriting Consultation- The other two
- If you can't write unique content for each form because the subjects are too close (Copyright vs Content) then it begs the question why you have the 4 forms in the first place.
If you want to keep the 4 forms then can canonicalize 3 of them to the main one, so only 1 is set to rank.
Note: If you do canonicalize it is not guaranteed that Google won't feature either one or all the other forms. You are simply telling Google that that is your preference.
- You could noindex three of the four forms which would be a perfectly acceptable solution even though most scanning software will warn you of the no indexes.
I hope that helps
Nigel
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
-
We have 2 versions of URLs. we have the mobile and the desktop. is that a duplicate content?
Hi, Our website has two version of URLs. dektop: www.myexample.com and mobile www.myexample.com/m If you go to our site from a mobile device you will land on our mobile URL, if you go to our site from desktop computer you will land on a regular URL. Both urls have the same content. Is that considered duplicate? If yes, then what can I do to fix it? Also, both URLs are indexed by google. We have two separate XML sitemaps- one for desktop and one for mobile. Is that a good SEO practice?
Technical SEO | | Armen-SEO0 -
Looking for a technical solution for duplicate content
Hello, Are there any technical solutions to duplicate content similar to the nofollow tag? A tag which can indicate to Google that we know that this is duplicate content but we want it there because it makes sense to the user. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Is anyone using Canonicalization for duplicate content
Hi i am trying to find out if anyone is using Canonicalization for duplicate content on a joomla site. I am using joomla 1.5 and trying to find either a module or manually how to sort this out as i have over 300 pages of duplicate content because i am not using this technique any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
Is it possible to be penalized as duplicate content for one keyword but not another?
I help develop an online shopping cart and after a request from management about some products not showing up in the SERP's I was able to pinpoint it down to mostly a duplicate content issue. It's a no brainer as some times new products are inserted in with copied text from the manufacturers website. I recently though stumbled across a odd problem. When we partially re-wrote the content to seem unique enough it seemed to remedy the issue for some keywords and not others. A) If you search the company name our category listing shows as #1 ahead of the manufacturers website. We always did rank for this term. B) If you search the product name our product page is listed #3 behind two other listings which belong to the manufacturer. C) If you search the keywords together as "company product" we are still being filtered out as duplicate content. When I allow the filtered results to show we are ranking #4 It's been a full month since the changes were indexed. Before I rewrite the content even further I thought I would ask to see if any one has any insight as to what could be happening.
Technical SEO | | moondog6040 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0