Duplicate content on yearly product models.
-
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content?
Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes.
The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches.
Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product.
Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue?
The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold.
Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
-
The exact threshold that Google uses to determine duplicate content is a tricky one.
The more important question is, are you noticing a problem? Are both pages being indexed (2013 & 2014)? When you search for the 2014 model in Google, is it showing up in the search results or is it being filtered out as duplicate content? If your content isn't being indexed or isn't ranking, then you have a problem.
Panda also can be an issue, but only if a large portion of your site is duplicated. Is this model upgrade process something you apply to 1 or 2 products, or are you talking hundreds? What proportion of your site is nearly duplicate content compared to original content. If the percentage is too large, you could be at risk of Panda.
If this is only for a couple of pages, you can always just take a little time to re-write the description from last year to improve its uniqueness, and also bolster the page with unique content like user reviews and new photos & videos of your product. Once a product model is discontinued, you can also 301 redirect it to the newer models.
-
First, yes it's an issue if 80% of the content is duplicate. Panda will not like this at all.
There are a few strategies that will fix the issue... primarily write new content. I know its time consuming, but content is king. Take the old description and reword it, tweek it, change it. ...anything to make it different than last years product content.
You can also iframe the old product description on the new page. This will prevent Google from indexing the old content on the new page. But then your new page might have too thin of content...back to the original solution...write more content.
Rand had a video about this issue a few weeks ago. http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls
Hope this helps
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 issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Is This Considered Duplicate Content?
My site has entered SEO hell and I am not sure how to fix it. Up until 18 months ago I had tremendous success on Google and Bing and now my website appears below my Facebook page for the term "Direct Mail Raleigh." What makes it even more frustrating is my competitors have done no SEO and they are dominating this keyword. I thought that the issue was due to harmful inbound links and two months ago I disavowed ones that were clearly spam. Somehow my site has actually gone down! I have a blog that I have updated infrequently and I do not know if it I am getting punished for duplicate content. On Google Webmaster Tools it says I have 279 crawled and indexed pages. Yesterday when I ran the MOZ crawl check I was amazed to find 1150 different webpages on my site. Despite the fact that it does not appear on the webmaster tools I have three different webpages due to the format that the Wordpress blog was created: "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/part2leadershi/", "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/page/91/" and "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/category/competent-leadership/page/3/" What does not make sense to me is why Google only indexed 279 webpages AND why MOZ did not identify these three webpages as duplicate content with the Crawl Test Tool. Does anyone have any ideas? Would it be as easy as creating a massive robot.txt file and just putting 2 of the 3 URLs in that file? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
What is the better of 2 evils? Duplicate Product Descriptions or Thin Content?
It is quite labour intensive to come up with product descriptions for all of our product range ... +2500 products, in English and Spanish... When we started, we copy pasted manufacturer descriptions so they are not unique (on the web), plus some of them repeat each other - We are getting unique content written but its going to be a long process, so, what is the best of 2 evils, lots of duplicate non unique content or remove it and get a very small phrase from the database of unique thin content? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Best way to remove duplicate content with categories?
I have duplicate content for all of the products I sell on my website due to categories and subcategories. Ex: http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/product/stockfeeder-af38.php http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/co-matic-power-feeders/stockfeeder-af38.php http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/co-matic-power-feeders/heavy-duty-feeders/stockfeeder-af38.php Above are 3 urls to the same title and content. I use a third party developer backend system so doing canonicalization seems difficult as I don't have full access. What is the best to get rid of this duplicate content. Can I do it through webmaster tools or should I pay the developer to do the canonicalization or a 301 redirect? Any suggestions? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kysizzle60 -
Duplicate page content
Hi. I am getting error of having duplicate content on my website and pages its showing there are: www.mysitename.com www.mysitename.com/index.html As my best knowledge it only one page, I know this can be solved with some conical tag used in header, but do not know how. Can anyone please tell me about that code or any other way to get this solved. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetraffic0 -
Removing Duplicate Content Issues in an Ecommerce Store
Hi All OK i have an ecommerce store and there is a load of duplicate content which is pretty much the norm with ecommerce store setups e.g. this is my problem http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChriSEOcouk
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/brandname/product1.html so all the above lead to the same product
I also want to keep the breadcrumb path to the product Here's my plan Add a canonical URL to the product page
e.g. http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
This way i have a short product URL Noindex all duplicate pages but do follow the internal links so the pages are spidered What are the other options available and recommended? Does that make sense?
Is this what most people are doing to remove duplicate content pages? thanks 🙂0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0