Duplicate Content Question
-
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply.
For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate.
Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content?
The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
-
Thank you for your provided example, that's exactly what I meant.
You have the following "default" display:
http://www.neworleansrestaurants.com/restaurants/
and the following one which is a "variant" of the first one:
http://www.neworleansrestaurants.com/restaurants/?loc=all
You are actually showing the "same" listings ordered differently... so, a rel=canonical in my opinion will put you safe:
-
I can't give you the specific example of the site because it's undergoing redesign
However, we have a similar issue on a sister site. It has 2 separate pages with the same listings but different categories:
By location: http://www.neworleansrestaurants.com/restaurants/?loc=all
By type of restaurant http://www.neworleansrestaurants.com/restaurants/
Thanks for the feed and information Fabrizo.
-
I don't understand why the content of those 2 pages are the same if they show different categories... are same listings ordered differently? Can we have a look at those pages?
-
On our site only difference is that different pages show up different results. I.e., the page with results A will have a title tag and content related to page A. The page results for page B will also have a unique page with a unique title tag. In that case, the listings are the same.. but they appear on two pages, each with a unique category that should have its own page. In this case, the categories are “location” and “type.”
-
I would need to have a look at your website to understand how it is structured, but I have a very similar case on my site virtualsheetmusic.com, and I think it is a common case for e-commerce websites in general as well, and I think the best way to avoid any issues is to use a rel=canonical tag.
For example, if your page URL for a search can vary in the following way:
http://www.yoursite.com/search.php [assuming this is the "default" page display]
http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?sort=title
http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?sort=title&filter=NY
I would put a rel-canonical like:
pointing to the "default" version of the page. That would avoid any duplicate issues very easily!
Also, if you have paginated content (2 or more pages results) you may want to add the rel=prev and rel=next definitions as suggested by Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
I hope this helps.
-
Hi, if you're trying to make your website better for the end user you almost can't lose. Google wants what the end-user wants fast page loads times relevant content and easy navigation to name a few of the things that are important to Google & visitors. You'll find that if you match the two you will almost always get it right.
I hope this is been of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks for the feedback Thomas. I should note that this situation is all on one website.
-
I believe the easiest way to answer this. Is if you have website A & B. Well I get the exact same answer if I query whatever the keyword "example" is? From both websites? If so I always get the same answer?
If the answer to that is yes I will get the same answer to make this query the same.
From each website then I would say will have trouble with the content however if the answer is no I would say you want to examine further for how much of is identical.
I'm not fan of having identical content especially when you control it. if it is the same result. Then yes you'll get to content issues with Google and I would not recommend creating an additional website to order content from the same database because it sounds to me like you will be getting identical answers for queries is this correct?
Do understand how your gathering content from the database so it would have to be identical right? If this is the case then I would not create additional website I would created this website if you need to do different subject but if you have one already just focus on creating a better version of that website.
I hope this is of help,
Thomas
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
-
Manage category pages and duplicate content issues
Hi everybody, I am now auditing this website www.disfracessimon.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
this website has some issues with canonicals and other things. But right now I have found something that I would like to know your opinion. When I was checking parts of the content in google to find duplicate content issues I found this: I google I searched: "Chaleco de streck decorado con botones" and found First result: "Hombre trovador" is the one I was checking -> Correct
The following results are category pages where the product is listed in. I was wondering if this could cause any problem related with duplicated content. Should I no index category pages or should I keep it?
The first result in google was the product page. And category pages I think are good for link juice transfer and to capture some searchs from Google. Any advice? Thank you0 -
Duplicate content - Images & Attachments
I have been looking a GWT HTML improvements on our new site and I am scratching my head on how to stop some elements of the website showing up as duplicates for Meta Descriptions and Titles. For example the blog area: <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CocoonfxmediaThis blog is full of information and resources for you to implement; get more traffic, more leads an
/blog/
/blog/page/2/
/blog/page/3/
/blog/page/4/
/blog/page/6/
/blog/page/9/The page has rel canonicals on them (using Yoast Wordpress SEO) and I can't see away of stopping the duplicate content. Can anyone suggest how to combat this? or is there nothing to worry about?
0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Why is Google Reporting big increase in duplicate content after Canonicalization update?
Our web hosting company recently applied a update to our site that should have rectified Canonicalized URLs. Webmaster tools had been reporting duplicate content on pages that had a query string on the end. After the update there has been a massive jump in Webmaster tools reporting now over 800 pages of duplicate content, Up from about 100 prior to the update plus it reporting some very odd pages (see attached image) They claim they have implement Canonicalization in line with Google Panda & Penguin, but surely something is not right here and it's going to cause us a big problem with traffic. Can anyone shed any light on the situation??? Duplicate%20Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Penalised for duplicate content, time to fix?
Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix... I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died. I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere. I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content? The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page. Thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate content that looks unique
OK, bit of an odd one. The SEOmoz crawler has flagged the following pages up as duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/november-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-winter-insulation http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/july-2011/telephone-issues-$9-2nd-july-2011 http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-nordic-walking-poles http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380