Is there an percentage of duplicate content required before you should use a canonical tag?
-
Is there a percentage (approximate or exact) of duplicate content you should have before you use a canonical tag? Similarly how does Google handle canonical tags if the pages aren’t 100% duplicate?
I've added some background and an example below;
- Nike Trainer model 1 – has an overview page that also links to a sub-page about cushioning, one about Gore-Tex and one about breathability.
- Nike Trainer model 2,3,4,5 – have an overview page that also links to sub-pages page about cushioning , Gore-Tex and breathability.
In each of the sub-pages the URL is a child of the parent so a distinct page from each other e.g.
- /nike-trainer/model-1/gore-tex
- /nike-trainer/model-2/gore-tex.
There is some differences in material composition, some different images and of course the product name is referred multiple times. This makes the page in the region of 80% unique.
-
Hi Dan
Thanks for coming back.
Great, so canonicals will be taken into consideration regardless.
Do you have any suggestions on how to mitigate the negative effects of duplicate content if it is unavoidable? Hypothetically. Excluding canonical tags?
Thanks again.
-
There's no exact rule as far as I'm aware, but generally 75-80% unique is a commonly quoted threshold.
The actually amount of duplicate content on a page won't affect how Google handle a canonical tag - either the tag is there or not, just the same as a redirect etc.
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
-
Multilingual -> ahref lang, canonical and duplicated title content
Hi all! We have our site eurasmus.com where we are implementing the multilingual.
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
We have already available english and spanish and we use basically href lang to control different areas. First question: When a page is not translated but still is visible in both langauges under /en and /es is it enough with the hreflang or should we
add a canonical as well? Nowadays we are apply href lang and only canonicals to the one which are duplicated
in the same language. Second question: When some pages are not translated, like http://eurasmus.com/en/info/find-intern-placement-austria and http://eurasmus.com/es/info/find-intern-placement-austria,
we are setting up the href lang but still moz detects title and meta duplicated (not duplicate page content).
What do you suggest we should do? Let me know and thank you before hand for your help!0 -
How to deal with 80 websites and duplicated content
Consider the following: A client of ours has a Job boards website. They then have 80 domains all in different job sectors. They pull in the jobs based on the sectors they were tagged in on the back end. Everything is identical across these websites apart from the brand name and some content. whats the best way to deal with this?
Technical SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Duplicate content for vehicle inventory.
Hey all, In the automotive industry... When uploading vehicle inventory to a website I'm concerned with duplicate content issues. For example, 1 vehicle is uploaded to the main manufacturers website, then again to the actual dealerships website & then again to Craigslist & even sometimes to a group site. The information is all the same, description, notes, car details & images. What would you all recommend for alleviating duplicate content issues? Should I be using the rel canonical back to the manufacturers website? Once the vehicle is sold all pages disappear. Thanks so much for any advice.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Duplicate content on report
Hi, I just had my Moz Campaign scan 10K pages out of which 2K were duplicate content and URL's are http://www.Somesite.com/modal/register?destination=question%2F37201 http://www.Somesite.com/modal/register?destination=question%2F37490 And the title for all 2K is "Register" How can i deal with this as all my pages have the register link and login and when done it comes back to the same page where we left and that it actually not duplicate but we need to deal with it propely thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
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 -
How can something be duplicate content of itself?
Just got the new crawl report, and I have a recurring issue that comes back around every month or so, which is that a bunch of pages are reported as duplicate content for themselves. Literally the same URL: http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is reporting that http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is both a duplicate title, and duplicate content. Well, I would hope so! It's the same URL! Is this a crawl error? Is it a site error? Has anyone seen this before? Do I need to give more information? P.S. awesomewidgetworld is not the actual site name.
Technical SEO | | BetAmerica0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0 -
Duplicate Content -->?ss=facebook
Hi there, When searching site:mysite.com my keyword I found the "same page" twice in the SERP's. The URL's look like this: Page 1: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm Page 2: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm**?ss=facebook** The ?ss=facebook is caused by a bookmark button inserted in some of our product pages. My question is... will the canonical tag do to solve this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15565529539090