Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
-
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords.
I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them.
I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic.
My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
-
Yea I found a folder and in it was not just the towns from that county but folders for each county which were also up a folder level (where they should be). I don't use PPC for the Top 10 site listed in my profile. I use it for the site I've had the issue with here (a separate site not listed in my my profile). It's a white label site but I'm struggling to make the PPC profitable to be honest. Any tips appreciated!
-
Typically, I counsel moving slowly on changes rather than quickly. With that, I would remove the duplication you mention and then watch it for a while. Then begin removing the duped pages county/city.
Now, when you say a subdirectory on your server which duplicated the whole site, I will assume you are clear that is what you were doing. I suggest being sure that was what was happening. Also, I still recommend checking the links given the timing and severity of the drop you saw. You did not see a Panda type drop over time. You saw a dramatic drop at a fixed point.
As to the PPC, the question was different. I know a lot about the dating vertical as I did lead brokerage years ago in that industry when there were a lot more players. My concern, given the top ten variety of site, was that if you are doing any markets where your client is also doing PPC, you risk getting your entire site in a ton of trouble. I sensed you might not be as seasoned as some others and it can be a real problem to recover from.
LMK if I can assist.
Robert
-
I do use PPC but no index my PPC pages.
-
Thanks Robert. I've just found out to my horror whilst browsing files on my server that within one off my subdirectory folders was an entire copy of my site meaning every single page was duplicated! I'm not a pro web designer/SEO and looks like I've made an expensive mistake!
I definitely need to remove the folder I've found which duplicated the entire site but do you think I should also remove the county/town pages as a precaution or leave them and hope it was the error I've just found that was causing the problem?
-
SamCUK
You are harming your site (who knows how much) and given your topic I do not think you are going to get as laser like (longtail is a laser) as you want. The first question when I see "landing pages" is are you also doing PPC using this technique? If your drop was in and around October of 2013 (8 months) it is more likely the drop is due to links (penguin) especially given the timing and severity.
As to your question on will traffic return if you remove the pages, there is no answer available other than trying it. If you are concerned, pick out some of the pages with known traffic loss and return to where you were before with 20 or 30% of them. Check it over 30, 60, and 90 days. But, also check your link profile.
Best,
-
Yeah unfortunately there is no easy answer to this :o(. If there is no traffic then 404 would be cool. But if you have a few winners in the lot then I would build those out (build a new unique page and create rich content) and 301 them.
-
Thanks for your reply. I don't have the time to write significantly different content for these pages and I don't think the amount of traffic available for these long tail keywords warrants it. (I was just after an easy win which clear doesn't exist!) If I remove these pages perhaps it will give a boost to my main pages as any penalty should be removed by the algorithm? Would you agree? I could probably make up the 10% loss in traffic I'd get by removing the pages by at the same time receiving a traffic boost to my main pages due to any penalty being removed.
Should I 301 all the pages if I remove them? If so where to as I understand redirecting to the home page is not the best thing to do? There are very few links pointing to these pages so should I just let them 404? Won't they eventually be removed from the index?
-
Yea I have seen this before. You need to put some more work into describing each page to distinguish a difference to search engines. If a bulk of the pages on your site have the same basic content it could cause trouble. At a minimum your Counties should be very different from the sub city pages. Also if nobody is really searching for the Counties and Your Service I would eliminate that page. Also if you change anything don't forget your 301's.
-
Hi,
No the text is identical for each town within a county so 'Lincolnshire' and all the towns within it have the same text (except for the town name) but another county such as 'Suffolk' will have completely different text (however the towns within Suffolk all share the same text as the parent county).
The site is structured like:
/lincolnshire/
/lincolnshire/lincoln
/lincolnshire/grimsby
etc....
These pages account for less than 10% of my traffic but I think could be causing me more harm than good.
-
Does each page have significantly different content describing the geographic areas? Also how did you structure the content? Are the towns sub indexed behind the counties?
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, Same Company?
Hello Moz Community, I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations. For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc. They also have the same content on certain pages within each website. For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)? I hope this is clear. Thanks, Cole
On-Page Optimization | | ColeLusby0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Removing old URLs that are being used for my on page optimization?
Is there a way to remove old URL's that are still being used for my keywords for my on page optimization? They are giving me grades of F since they no longer exist and if I change the URL to the current one, the grade becomes an A, but they are still showing after the new crawl.
On-Page Optimization | | Dirty0 -
How to fix Duplicate Page Title
I have so many Duplicate Page Title issue on my website. www.soobumimphotography.com Though I had to use NAME + Area + Photographer on every title page so ended up something like this San Antonio Sports Photographer | Soobumim Photography : San Antonio Wedding Photographers | Soobumim Photography http://www.soobumimphotography.com/chicago-cubs-at-houston-astros-mlb-soobumim-photography/ What's the best way to fix this problem? Should I delete them? Redirect? - to be honest, I don't know how. I am using Yoast plugin
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
Duplicate content with a trailing slash /
Hi, I 've pages like this: A) www.example.com/file/ B) www.example.com/file Just two questions: Does Google see this as duplicate content? Best to 301 redirect B to A? Many thanks Richard PS I read previous threads re the subject, it sounded like there was a bug in SEOMoz but I was not absolutely clear. Apologies if this is going over old ground.
On-Page Optimization | | Richard5550 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Title
When you are in Error status for Duplicate Page Titles - but it is because of the root domain: Example.com and Example.com/index How to you go about changing the title of the same page without looking un-natural. My client has built his site with the - index file pulling to the root - but the crawlers are seeing TWO separate pages - when in reality they are the same. Riddle me this batman?
On-Page Optimization | | Chenzo0 -
Duplicate page titles
We have search results pages on our site. They share the same page title, there is no real differentiator between the result pages, other than page 1, page 2 etc. How do we de-dup the titles? just add page 1/2/3 etc to the end of them?
On-Page Optimization | | lilibooz0 -
What's the impact of # in the main domain page?
After a little research I did in the Source Code of the root domain page of seomoz.org and searchenginejournal.com , I found that the first one contains no at all and that the other contains like 10 . I though that the was something relatively important on a web page for on page optimisation. Did I missed something? What's you opinion on the subject? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0