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
-
.com and .co.uk duplicate content
hi mozzers I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
What to do about similar content getting penalized as duplicate?
We have hundreds of pages that are getting categorized as duplicate content because they are so similar. However, they are different content. Background is that they are names and when you click on each name it has it's own URL. What should we do? We can't canonical any of the pages because they are different names. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0 -
Duplicate Content Resolution Suggestion?
SEOmoz tools is saying there is duplicate content for: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/index.html What would be the best way to resolve this "error"?
Technical SEO | | PlasticCards0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0