Unavoidable duplicate page
-
Hi,
I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g.
Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Stuart
-
Thanks for your help with this. In the end we decided to go down the nofollow route after consulting the developer with your suggestions.
Stu
-
It's okay, we all just want to give you the best answer we can. It can be tough without specifics to give you actionable advice, but I'll keep trying!
My gut feeling here (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that if there is any appreciable difference in content (as you indicate above), then the dupe content thing may not be a problem. This sort of problem only exists for pages with multiple urls (like in more than one subdomain) or old mirrors that were never taken down and such. If you offer similar services with alot of the same content but slightly different service sections, you shouldn't be flagged for dupes.
Why not skip any tactics for now, get the site launched, remove the older content, and use Moz to run a crawl and see if any further content is flagged? Sounds to me like this is a borderline dupe content issue and may not really be a problem for the engines. I don't think I can really say until the pages are live. Let us know when they are!
-
The content in the 'details' subsections are identical between service 1 and 2, but the details sections aren't identical within their own service sections. Anyone confused yet?! I'm really sorry I can't share any links of the site, it's currently still in development.
Stu
-
Tentative yes. If the subsections are different "pages" it should work the same.
However, since you aren't specific with the URLs, I can't visit the pages to see how exactly appropriate this is. I've optimized thousands of paginated and product pages with this problem, and rel-canonicaling (yes I made up that verb) them worked best for us. If you'd like a more accurate answer, feel free to share example URLs for me to poke around in.
-
That DOES sound cool...
So will that also work for any sub-sections within the product-x section too? I probably should have mentioned but product-x has a sub set of pages which arn't unique e.g.
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-2
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-2
Stu
-
So if you have to FORCE the engines to prioritize one of multiple duplicates, you have a few options. Assuming you want both pages to exist, you can provide a nofollow or noindex rule to one of the duplicates. This is a blunt approach which works well but not really the coolest.
The coolest option is to give one a canonical tag. Telling the engines that one of the multiple duplicates is the "canonical" one is what Google even recommends (and it has all sorts of neat downstream SEO benefits anyway.
So add a "rel canonical" tag to the "proper" page. Matt lays it out here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Let us know how it goes!
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your response. I probably should have said but I have vastly simplified the description of this problem. Product-x is actually made of lots of components and sub pages within itself. Which is the reason I can't re-write product-x for each service section.
So there will be lots of duplicate pages within each product-x section. The service 1 and 2 sections are unique however.
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
Is product-x just one component in each of these services along with other components?
If so, could you not solve this by having content on each of the service pages about those services and then a small amount of info about product-x on each of those pages with a read more type link to product-x on the actual product-x page.
So you would have:
domain.com/service1
domain.com/service2both of which point to a page showing product-x at domain.com/product-x
If that is not possible then there isn't a way around having duplicate pages as I can see it.
Peter
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Problem with duplicate pages due to mobile site.
Hey everyone, We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages: http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400 Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
Partially duplicated content on separate pages
TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO? Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages. Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable. For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course. Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry". There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
Duplicate Page Content error but I can't see it
Hi All We're getting a lot of Duplicate Page Content errors but I can't match it up. For example this page: http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/32-antique-cottage It is saying the on page properties as follows: Title DayTripFinder - Things to do reviewed by you - 7,000 attractions <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Meta Description</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Read Reviews, Browse Opening Hours and Prices. View Photos, Maps. 7,000 UK Visitor Attractions.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">But this isn't the page title or meta description.
Technical SEO | | KateWaite85
</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">And it's showing five (many others) example pages that share it. Again the page titles and description are different.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/mckinlay-theatre</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/bakers-dolphin</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/shipley-park-fishing</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/king-johns-lodge-and-gardens</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/city-hall
</dt> Any ideas? Not sure if I'm missing something here! Thanks!0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Is using a customer quote on multiple pages duplicate content?
Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
How to Solve Duplicate Page Content Issue?
I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website. I have found 89 duplicate content issue from report. Please, look in to Duplicate Page Content Issue. I am quite confuse to resolve this issue. Can any one suggest me best solution to resolve it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0