How much does on-site duplicated content affect SERPs?
-
Hi,
We've recently gotten into Moz, with our E-commerce websites, and discovered that it's crawler takes note of about 2500 pages which it thinks are the same (duplicated). We've now begun to completely rewrite every description of every product (including Meta Title/Description) so that this number may be reduced.
Since this is the biggest issue Moz spots I'm wondering what the effect of fixing it will be on our position in the SERP (mainly Google). Does anybody have some stories or experience about this topic?
Thanks in Advance!
Alexander
-
Thanks for your insight!
we're trying to get all of our pages rank A, according to Moz's on-page analyis, optimised for different keywords. -
If the duplicate content was duplicated on other sites, then by rewriting the content and making it unique, you may see your site ranking for keywords you didn't rank for previously. Google and Bing try to weed out duplicate content. They prefer to just show one result with that content. So, typically, they pick one of the pages that has the content, the one they think it the original, and they only include that page in the search results (at least in the first few pages). So, if you're site was being kept out of the search results because Google didn't pick your site to display, you may now start to rank for those keywords.
As to how dramatic a change it will be for you, it depends on how competitive the keywords are, how well you optimize the pages, and how authoritative your website is.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Yeah! We're re-doing all content! including categories, which we want to rank for their specific keywords of course
-
Depends on how fast your pages get crawled again, which depends on your niche and your domain trust as well.
Ive gotten badly optimised ecom sites to rank by just making great onpage seo changes. In a highly competitive space, you will see less "drastic" jumps but you'll still be able to see it. Be sure to add great unique content on your category pages ok?
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
-
NO Meta description pulling through in SERP with react website - Requesting Indexing & Submitting to Google with no luck
Hi there, A year ago I launched a website using react, which has caused Google to not read my meta descriptions. I've submitted the sitemap and there was no change in the SERP. Then, I tried "Fetch and Render" and request indexing for the homepage, which did work, however I have over 300 pages and I can't do that for every one. I have requested a fetch, render and index for "this url and linked pages," and while Google's cache has updated, the SERP listing has not. I looked in the Index Coverage report for the new GSC and it says the urls and valid and indexable, and yet there's still no meta description. I realize that Google doesn't have to index all pages, and that Google may not also take your meta description, but I want to make sure I do my due diligence in making the website crawlable. My main questions are: If Google didn't reindex ANYTHING when I submitted the sitemap, what might be wrong with my sitemap? Is submitting each url manually bad, and if so, why? Am I simply jumping the gun since it's only been a week since I requested indexing for the main url and all the linked urls? Any other suggestions?
Web Design | | DigitalMarketingSEO1 -
40 percent redundant content on landing pages with 60 percent unique information.
I have searched schema.org for tags to use for our redudant content on 25 unique local landing pages. The redundant content references our services and abilities on each page. Could anyone tell me how to retain this content and direct the search engines to disregard this portion of the landing page. We are a WordPress site -- if there is a plugin - I would love to know which one might work, although I have not been able to find one that will protect us from duplicate content issues. Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | seant1190 -
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Domain is now just a localized wordpress site.
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Do I need to redirect every single page that no longer exists at this domain? loveyourcabinets.com used to be loveyourkitchenandbath.com but we have since changed course. We want loveyourkitchenandbath.com to be our local site on Long Island and NYC. Loveyourcabinets.com will be an ecommerce project that I'll be revamping in the coming months. I think Moz as well as Google still has all of the old ecommerce pages indexed. And of course, Moz is shooting me a bunch of error all regarding pages from the ecommerce site that used to be on loveyourkitchenandbath.com. Any thoughts? Commentary? Thx
Web Design | | loveyourkitchen0 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
How do I identify what is causing my Duplicate Page Content problem?
Hello, I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly is causing my duplicate page content problem... For example, SEOMoz is picking up these four pages as having the same content: http://www.penncare.net/ambulancedivision/braunambulances/express.aspx http://www.penncare.net/ambulancedivision/recentdeliveries/millcreekparamedicservice.aspx http://www.penncare.net/ambulancedivision/recentdeliveries/monongaliaems.aspx http://www.penncare.net/softwaredivision/emschartssoftware/emschartsvideos.aspx As you can tell, they really aren't serving the same content in the body of the page. Anybody have an idea what might be causing these pages to show up as Duplicate Page Content? At first I thought it was the photo gallery module that might be causing it, but that only exists on two of the pages... Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | BGroup0 -
Considering site navigation options
I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement. I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks. (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers). I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion. This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories. What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system. I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with. Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong? Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?
Web Design | | EugeneF0 -
Dynamic pages and code within content
Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click. Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.
Web Design | | tgraham0