Some Content The Same
-
Hello.
I am about to publish some landing pages that target different industries that we are trying to market to.
X for Accountants
X for Financial Advisors
X for Fitness Trainers
X for XWhile a good portion of the content is unique on each page "the benefits of using X for accountants" some of the content on the page is duplicate which explains more about how our software works (the features), this will be the same content on every page.
Is this considered duplicate content? What should I be aware of in term of Google rankings and penalties?
Thanks,
David -
It is considered duplicate. It isn't a huge deal if it's only a portion of the page, the bigger issue is that it will be essentially ignored on all but one of those pages - think of that section like a black spot that search engines won't "see".
If it makes up the majority of your content on these pages you're going to have a bad time, but if it's just a small section amongst quality content I wouldn't be too worried from a ranking perspective.
Having said that, a better way to deal with this type of situation is to have a separate page that talks about how your product/service works rather than duplicating the same bit of content page after page. It lets you go into more detail since anyone reading it obviously wants to know all about it, and it means much easier editing if this process ever changes, too.
Something else to consider is that, admittedly with very little info to work with here, it sounds like your content may be falling into the common trap of telling users what you want them to know rather than offering the info they're looking for. For most users, exactly how your process works may be of 0 importance to them until they're comfortable with what you have to offer, at which point an "our process" type of page is perfect for their next step; "this sounds great, but do they provide xyz with it as well?".
If this is correct for your users, that's even more reason to avoid duplicating this same bit of content on these pages - you'd be taking on the risks of content duplication for the sake of presenting users with info they may not care about at this stage of the buying process.
If a separate page for this isn't an option for some reason, you might find Rand's WBF on essentially the same topic to be a helpful explanation. I know he's talking about duplication of external content but the concept is the same.
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
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Social engineering Content detected
Hi there I am Facing Social Engineering Content Detected on www.domain.com from long time, we have Removed All Bad Java script, unnecessary links, bad content. After removing we Did Review also in Google, But still again & again we are getting this Notification in webmaster, is This harmful for Our web traffic?? how do I permanently Clear This Notification ? please any body can help ? Thanx in advance
On-Page Optimization | | iepl20 -
Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above the fold content with shopify
Hello, It seems that my shopify website needs to eliminate render-blocking CSS in above the fold content to get better mobile speed and I don't see or find anything about how this could be done. I have succeeded with a wordpress site but the way things are restricted with shopify, I have not been able to do the same. The other thing would be to leverage browser caching which I have no clue how it can be done with shopify either. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Mabo320 -
Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Is content aggregation good SEO?
I didn't see this topic specifically addressed here: what's the current thinking on using content aggregation for SEO purposes? I'll use flavors.me as an example. Flavors.me lets you set up a domain that pulls in content from a variety of services (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc.). There's also a limited ability to publish unique content as well. So let's say that we've got MyDomain.com set up, and most of the content is being drawn in from other services. So there's blog posts from WordPress.com, videos from YouTube, a photo gallery from Flickr, etc. How would Google look at this scenario? Is MyDomain.com simply scraped content from the other (more authoritative) sources? Is the aggregated content perceived to "belong" to MyDomain.com or not? And most importantly, if you're aggregating a lot of content related to Topic X, will this content aggregation help MyDomain.com rank for Topic X? Looking forward to the community's thoughts. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | GOODSIR0 -
Guest vs Logged In Content
Hi Mozzers I have a client that recently launched a q&a and he has the answers hidden by registering for free you can see the answers. It's a free community. Now the question comes: Google will not get the entire page only the question content which I think is bad. What option would solve the issue. Have thought about making the answers hidden through css... so if you're a guest the answers are display:none . But it has to be a better option than dirty things like this 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | mosaicpro0