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
-
How to fix non-crawlable pages affected by CSS modals?
I stumbled across something new when doing a site audit in SEMRUSH today ---> Modals. The case: Several pages could not be crawled because of (modal:) in the URL. What I know: "A modal is a dialog box/popup window that is displayed on top of the current page" based on CSS and JS. What I don't know: How to prevent crawlers from finding them.
Web Design | | Dan-Louis0 -
Lost Rankings Late April Even Though We Have A Mobile Site
I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google. This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives? Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Web Design | | inhouseseo0 -
Manufacturer, New Direct-to-Consumer Site (Separate Site, or Sub-Domain?)
Hi All! Working with an established manufacturer, been around for many years, it's an internationally known brand, and their products are sold by thousands on distributors. They recently started a new website (separate from their old established B2B manufacturer site) which will be used to sell direct to customer. The new site is great, with a nice responsive design, clean look, flexible, etc. The problem is, it's a new site with low Domain Authority. The manufacturer's B2B site has been around a while, very high Domain Authority. So, I'd like to be able to harness all the link equity they've build instead of trying to optimize a brand new site. The problem with this old established site is that it IS in fact old. The design is terrible, it's not responsive, old code, bad look and feel, etc. We could incorporate the new B2C site (which has its own CMS) into a sub-domain, like store.site.com. But, I'd worry that site.com's crapiness will limit growth potential for the new pages at store.site.com. Same issue were we to add the new site into a sub-folder, like site.com/store/. On the other side, we could just keep the new site, with it's own domain, sitestore.com, and have product pages and/or category pages from the manufacturer's B2B site link to the relevant pages on the new B2C site. Thanks!
Web Design | | fiberglass0 -
Any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly?
John Mueller's input in the EGWMH hangout suggests that Google MAY ignore expandable content served by Javascript. Are there any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly? I do however view these as good for website interactivity and UX - and see many examples of websites performing well and ranking highly whilst using these techniques - are there any Google friendly ways to serve content on a page so that search bots can recognise and choose to crawl / consume the content as legitimate fodder?
Web Design | | Fergclaw0 -
Internal linking for small site
I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages. All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text. So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links) Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious). What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages? I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.
Web Design | | Zoolander0 -
Bar Codes for Event Sites
A client is requesting bar codes for simple tracking of event attendees. Their need is to be able to verify at the door someone has registered and then have that data link to the registrant to show who did/did not attend, etc. We looked at QR code solutions (seems bar code makes more sense at this point) and now are at a point where we need input from any who have experience with either system and could potentially make a recommendation. A person would sign up for this once a year event (no charge, informational) on the site and be able to print off their registration ticket to bring to the event. If it could also be downloaded to iPhone/Android that would be a plus as well. When they come through the door the code is scanned and registrant is in. Simple. They currently keep a database of past attendees and only use it for general area the attendees are from and how many show over time, etc. Since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we were hoping a mozzer might have insight. thanks, Robert
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Responsive Vs Mobile Sites
I know this is some cutting edge technology, but I think that this will be a very important topic in the coming months, as html5/css3 becomses more and more the standard, or at least standardized, I think the topic of this in relation to SEO will also arise much more. My question is simple, is it better to code a responsive site, or a completely mobile site for a small company with no special needs (mobile ordering, ecommerce, etc...) I obviously know the visuall differences, and, personally, I think respomsive websites look better. From an seo perspective, my big thing is for the resizing, for example, with WordPress, when you reach the tablet size you can set the sidebar to basically display:none, can that impact your website? I would really appreciate any feedback
Web Design | | ZacharyRussell0 -
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