Duplicate content question
-
Hi
I have a site that is run off one CMS system but has 3 different web addresses. One is a comic shop, one is a toy shop and one is a game shop. Now due to the nature of what we are selling some of the products we are selling on both or all 3 of the sites.
I was wondering as to whether this would affect my ability to rank in google and if i would be penalised for any duplicate content?
Thanks in advance
-
One trick you can do is dilute the text pretty easily and make some small changes to make them compete with each other instead of one canceling two out like a duplicate content will get you. You could try something like this and it should be pretty easy to implement if you are using a template based cart system.
Shop 1 - Just have the normal product description on the page and all of the standard text you have from your menu, ect basically changing nothing.
Shop 2 - If your site is utilizing rich snippets, change them on a template level. Most work like this $template_variable So on the second site delete a little bit of the rich snippet data, say the condition and the manufacturer name. At the same time on every product page add a 200-400 word shipping and return policy. As the current standards are, that should dilute everything enough to look like a totally different page.
Shop 3 - Basically the same as shop 2, change the rich snippet data that is sent a little. Maybe it could be adding manufacturer data that is not in the other templates, or taking something else that is non essential out of the template. Then add in on the product pages a different but meaning the same 100-200 word shipping policy. At the same time either add in an "about" section for the manufacturer, or if you have too many manufacturers for this to be reasonable add in an about for your company on every product page.
By doing this you will make the pages compete with each other instead of making one page dominate. If you are using a template based CMS, the changes should be easy and should only take about an hr or two to do, minus the time to write the content.
-
Highland has a very good answer to this for sure. But i'd like to add something. We are magento specialists and work with a lot of multi-store environments, i'd say follow the following steps
- Best case: try to write unique copy per website with the same product and title. this would be fine, as long as the content is really unique on all 3 sites you have 3 ranking opportunities in stead of one.
- Else: If thats costs to much time or effort and does not give you enough ROI just choose highland's method of setting a canonical tag to you most powerful domain which is more likely to rank
- If thats to much time just forget it and let google fight it out, it wont give you much devaluation
-
It's not a penalty per se, it just means that Google is going to pick one copy and devalue the others. Does it affect your ability to rank? Not really. It just means one site is going to be the winner. Remember, a penalty is where Google devalues your whole site for bad behavior. Duplicate content is not bad behavior.
If you want to pick the rankings winner yourself you can add a canonical tag to the other pages pointing to the one you want to rank.
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
When I say duplicate content, I don't mean that the content on a clients site is displaying on another site on the web or taken from a site on the web. A client has a few product pages and each product page has content on the bottom of the page (4-5 paragraphs) describing the product. Now, this content is also displaying on other pages, but re-worded so it's not 100% duplicate. Some pages show a duplicate content % ranging from 12% to 35% and maybe 40%. Just curious if I should suggest having each product page less than 10% duplicated. Thanks for your help.
On-Page Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Ecommerce question - overoptimisation
Hi there, I'm the owner of this site http://goo.gl/76Mrbd and I have a newbie question We have a large number of vintage clothing items, and for SEO purposes I would like to rank for keywords "vintage insert designer name". I've been titling all our items with the phrase "vintage insert designer skirt/dress/pants etc" - but I've noticed that when we google these phrases - an example being "vintage moschino" we don't rank for them at all, despite the fact that each individual page gets a decent "page optimisation score" for that particular keyword. Many people have suggested to me that the reason this is so is because we're using the keyword too much on our site, but I can't get my head around how to fix this. What would be the best way to restructure our product descriptions so that we can fix this? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | clare_f1 -
How best to deal with internal duplicate content
hi having an issue with a client site and internal duplicate content. The client has a custom cms and when they post new content it can appear, in full, at two different urls on the site. Short of getting the client to move cms, which they won't do, I am trying to find an easy fix that they could do themselves. ideally they would add a canonical on one of the versions but the cms does allow them to view posts in html view, also would be a lot if messing about wth posting the page and then going back to the cms and adding the tag. the cms is unable to auto generate this either. The content editors are copywriters not programmers. Would there be a solution using wmt for this? They have the skill level to be able to add a url in wmt so im thinking that a stop gap solution could be to noindex one of the versions using the option in webmaster tools. Ongoing we will consult developers about modifying the cms but budgets are limited so looking for a cheap and quick solution to help until the new year. anyone know of a way other than wmt to block Google from seeing duplicate content. We can block Google from folders because only a small percentage of the content in the folder would be internally duplicate. would be very grateful for any suggestions anyone could offer. thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | daedriccarl0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
A question on cached pages
Hi all. I have been testing different ways of writing the text on the homepage of the website www document-management-solutions co.uk because we are ranking very low for the keyword Document Management Software. I've recently learnt about pages being 'cached' and wanted to just clarify something. The last time the page was cached was on 26th March. I have made changed to the homepage since then and wanted to see how it has affected our ranking. Will I not be able to know if it has had a positive/negative effect until the next time our page is cached? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | janc0 -
E commerce Website canonical and duplicate content isssue
i have a ecomerce site , i am just wondering if any one could help me answer this the more info page can be access will google consider it as duplicate and if it does then how to best use the canonical tag http://domain.com/product-page http://domain.com/product-page/ http://domain.com/product-Page http://domain.com/product-Page/ also in zencart when link product it create duplicate page content how to tackle it? many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | conversiontactics0 -
Duplicate content http:// something .com and http:// something .com/
Hi, I've just got a crawl report for a new wordpress blog with suffusion theme and yoast wordpress seo module and there is duplicate content for: http:// something .com and http:// something .com/ I just can't figure out how to handle this. Can I add a redirect for .com/ to .com in htaccess? Any help is appreciated! By the way, the tag value for rel canonical is **http:// something .com/ **for both.
On-Page Optimization | | DanielSndstrm0 -
Magento Layered Navigation & Duplicate Content
Hello Dear SeoMoz, I would like to ask your help with something that I am not sure off. Our ecommerce web site is built with Magento. I have found many problems so far and I know that there will be many more in the future. Currently, I am trying to find the best way to deal with the duplicate content that is produced from the layered navigation (size, gender etc). I have done a lot of research so far in order to understand which might be the best practice and I found the following practices: **Block layered navigation URLSs from the Google Webmaster Tools (**Apparently this works for Google Only). Block these URLs with the robots.txt file Make links no-follow **Make links JavaScript from Magento *** Avoid including these links in the xml site map. Avoid including these link in the A-Z Product Index. Canonical tag Meta Tags (noindex, nofollow) Question If I turn the layered navigation links into JavaScript links from the Magento Admin, the layered navigation links are still found by the crawlers but they look like that: | http://www.mysite.com/# instead of: http://www.mysite.com/girls-basics.html?gender_filte... | Can these new URLS (http://www.mysite.com/# ) solve the duplicate content problems with the layered navigation or do I need to implement other practices too to make sure that everything is done right. Kind Regards Stefanos Anastasiadis
On-Page Optimization | | alexandalexaseo0