How to solve this issue and avoid duplicated content?
-
My marketing team would like to serve up 3 pages of similar content; www.example.com/one, www.example.com/two and www.example.com/three; however the challenge here is, they'd like to have only one page whith three different titles and images based on the user's entry point (one, two, or three). To avoid duplicated pages, how would suggest this best be handled?
-
Bang on Nigel! Canonical tags are definitely the way to go on this one!
-
Hi Joelher
It's perfectly OK to have three pages very similar or even identical as long as you choose one main page to be canonicalized to:
So you have:
www.example.com/one (main page)
www.example.com/two - place the tag: <rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/one">in the section of this page.
www.example.com/three - place the tag: <rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/one"> in the section of this page.</rel="canonical"></rel="canonical">Pages two and three will not rank and all juice will be passed to /one
I hope that helps
Regards
NIgel
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Multiple H2 with no direct links to content and invisible body text - is this an issue?
OK, so we've lost pagerank and I think it's because of the way our site works (and we operate it). We have a videofolio, which shows on most of our pages, showcasing our work. Over time, we have tended to unpublish these pages and created new videofolio pages to show on our home page and relevant pages. The videofolio is a set of pages, each with a title, body text and a place to insert a link to the video, which is played through a videofolio showcase on our website (www.curveball-media.co.uk). Each is set a category, e.g. film, and when the user clicks the tab for 'film', the thumbnails pop up and the user can play the video. We have to work it this way as it's the only way to remove the videos from showing on our home page and to show new content instead. Simply deselecting a category still allows the videos to be seen when the 'all' category is selected by the user. Last week, I found a way of bringing back these unpublished pages by removing the 'all' tab from the videofolio. Then I turned each one into a blog like structure instead. Essentially, instead of the video link being played through the videofolio, we deselected a category (e.g. animation, film etc) and left the page floating. The only way you can access it without being attached to a videofolio category is through the direct link. By turning off the 'all' category and deselecting the page from any other categories, we were able to properly SEO these pages. NB: If they are created for use with the videofolio, you can have only extremely limited body text and no H2, as this is the text that appears when you hover over the video thumbnail. That's just the nature of the template. What I didn't anticipate is that now the code on the home page shows all these now (un)published pages and their corresponding H2 tags. Without a category selected, there is no way to get to these pages unless I create a direct link. I plan to do this through a blog post. In the home page code, the entire videofolio page shows, including the body text and link to the video. **This text doesn't show on the home page though, i.e. the user never sees this text. ** 1. Is it an issue to have so many similar H2 tags on the homepage? 2. Is it an issue that the code has text which is essentially invisible on the home page? 3. Is it an issue that the content is not linked to through the home page visibly? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical
I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site. The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL. Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive! My question is as follows: If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed? Hope this makes sense! Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allianzireland0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0 -
Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?
Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse. We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site. I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron0