Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
-
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag.
Manually changing the descriptions is not an option.
Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"?
Any other ideas?
Thanks!
-
Until your site is the KickAss site in your SERPs just add something catchy to the title tag like "Schedule a Tour!" ....... or....... "Free Beer"........ or..... "See it Today!"
-
Right... after your site is established this might not be a problem. I know that your site is relatively new and that it will become the KickAss site in your SERPs.
Don't do obsessive SEO if you can do efficient SEO.
-
Thank you! You've got some great points!
I like the idea of having both the address and the mls in the title and then reversing them for the mls.
For the photos I have the address as my alt tag. I could certainly add the mls too.
-
Oooh. I like this thought. Right now for most of these searches we are on the front page but not #1. However, this is a brand new site and I haven't built any links to it. So, perhaps, once I've got links and my site is viewed as the "kickass site in the niche" then the duplication will only be a problem for the other realtors?
-
The property address is most important and would definitely use that in the title. You'll find the MLS # to be almost as important. Why not include both in the title? Then reverse the order for H1?
I wouldn't be too concerned about duplicate content. I'm not sure about your area but most areas have an MLS that is syndicating the listings to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites which all use the same description.
In working with real estate sites I also found that "house for sale on {street name}" or "home for sale on {street name}" tended to drive traffic to the the individual property pages.
What are you doing with the property photos? I'd optimize those as well for the property address and MLS number.
-
Go out into the SERPs. See what's happening.
If you have the kickass site in the niche, your page for this home might rank well.
Other guy's problem, not yours.
-
LOL...this is why I was asking the question. Is there anything I can do to help other than manually changing the descriptions?
-
That's even worse.
-
Whoah! You definitely don't want that...
-
Oh...I may have worded my question incorrectly! The content is not duplicated across my site. Rather, the home description is the exact same content as on several other realtors' sites.
-
You can always just have the content indexable on one page and add it to an image for all the other pages.
-
I'd love to discuss this...in fact, I'm going to start a new discussion on it!
-
It's not that, it's just that it's potentially damaging (sorry, I'm quoting that Market Motive seminar again... been doing that a lot lately lol) to have an H1 and title tag that match.
-
Interesting idea. We do get hits because of the content in the description though. for example, we get a lot of hits for "In law suite".
-
Good idea, or have it in an iframe!
-
Is it possible for you to put that listing content in an image? This would allow you to continue using indentical content on all pages. However, the content in the image would not be searchable. If you are just using this content for the user experience, that's fine. If you want it indexed to add quality to the page, you will instead want to make each listing unique.
-
I guess it makes sense to have a different h1. What do you think would be most effective? I think the title should be the house address as this is most likely to be searched. Perhaps the H1 could be "MLS #123456"?
-
I don't know the answer to the actual question but I do know that you should never have the title and h1 match... or have dupe meta descriptions but you already know that
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
-
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Handling duplicate content, whilst making both rank well
Hey MOZperts, I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites. URL structure:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark
Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet) Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here. My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS. Is this possible? Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one? Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue? Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best. Thanks in advance!0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
How do I use public content without being penalized for duplication?
The NHTSA produces a list of all recalls for automobiles. In their "terms of use" it states that the information can be copied. I want to add that to our site, so there is an up-to-date list for our audience to see. However, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm allowed to according to NHTSA, but google will probably flag it right? Is there a way to do this without being penalized? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Showing Duplicate Content in Webmaster Tools.
About 6 weeks ago we completely redid our entire site. The developer put in 302 redirects. We were showing thousands of duplicate meta descriptions and titles. I had the redirects changed to 301. For a few weeks the duplicates slowly went down and now they are right back to where they started. Isn't the point of 301 redirects to show Google that content has permanently been moved? Why is it not picking this up? I knew it would take some time but I am right where I started after a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How can I remove duplicate content & titles from my site?
Without knowing I created multiple URLs to the same page destinations on my website. My ranking is poor and I need to fix this problem quickly. My web host doesn't understand the problem!!! How can I use canonical tags? Can somebody help, please.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZoeAlexander0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0