Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
-
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search.
These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as:
Order to [City] today.
So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good.
However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose.
We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have:
- Italy Page (Unique Content)
- Rome (Duplicate Content)
- Milan (Duplicate Content)
- Venice (Duplicate Content)
- etc. (Duplicate Content)
For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop.
So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
- Italy Page (Unique Content)
-
Thanks for the reply! Hmm, do you mean to add further scripted content to bulk out the pages? We currently have a lot of dynamic (so, near-duplicate, but basically duplicate) content on all of those pages - Page Titles are unique - but the content is the same, just replacing the City name in each paragraph. That's the problem really, so I'm not sure additional dynamic content will fix that unless I've got the wrong end of the stick?
-
Thanks for the reply - ideally the route we'd take is to have all of them rewritten, but the cost to do that is too simply high for ~1200 pages.
Further investigation shows that only around 500 of the 1200 pages actually bring in traffic, so we could lose (redirect to country pages) 700 of the pages, and write content for 500 - that would reduce the cost, but would still be fairly substantial. Will have to think about that; as you say, adding properly optimised unique content is definitely the way to go, just whether we can justify the cost.
-
Is padding out the content on the duplicated pages an option?
ie: If you where to add additional information to those pages, and slightly re-word those pages (as opposed to completely re-writing them), this could be a step in the right direction.
What is actually being duplicated about the page?
- The content
- The page title
Because both of these should be able to be dynamically re-written.
Feel free to PM me some examples.
- Paul.
-
If you can't write them, get them written. Might as well be the best investment you make in SEO. You would be able to maintain and monopolize your position on the SERPs with 1200 pages of unique content, properly optimized and targeting long tail keywords. Since you mention, these pages are already ranking high and bringing in traffic, IMO you shouldn't try and get rid of them. I know this is not exactly the advise you are looking for but if you are serious about your SERPs then its definitely worth the while.
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
-
Different WP Taxonomies seen as duplicate content
Hey guys, We're seeing Moz report "duplicate" content on pages like: mysite.com/interesting-category/ and mysite.com/interesting-tag. Why exactly is this, and is there something that we should do about this? Obviously some of the same posts will intersect on pages like category, tag, author pages. Thanks
Content Development | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Reviving a (very) old blog - is it worth shifting the content onto a new blog?
I look after a few ecommerce sites, one of them doesn't currently have a blog, we are setting up a wordpress blog now for the site. Going way back in time the site did have a blog which was on a separate Typepad domain. What I'm wondering is whether it is worth redirecting this whole blog to the new blog section of the site and copying some of the content over to the new blog as historical posts? I don't think it will be possible to redirect each individual post to a new one so it will just be a straight redirect of the old blog domain to the new one with the same (most of anyway) content. Do you think it is worth doing this for the value of this content which is relevant but dated (many of the links are now expired)? Doing this will take some time to do so it's not 'free' content we'd be getting We have a lot of new content planned out so we won't be short of content, just would be nice to have some historical content on there too Thanks
Content Development | | PeterLeatherland0 -
Duplicate Forum Content
HI everyone, great to be here, absolutely loving everything, please go easy on me I'm quite a noob when it comes to seo, but hopefully my question isn't too basic. After running the initial checks on my websites, I found there are 7,646 duplicate pages? Some are easy fixes but the majority are not, being forum pages, the edit, quote and new post links are coming up as duplicates of the main post? Does anyone know how to fix this? Best Lee
Content Development | | LeeC0 -
Will having duplicate content on four websites cause a problem?
A client of ours has four websites for different shops they run in the surrounding area. Each website has original content as well as duplicate content. This is for things like product advice which needs to be the same Will having duplicate content on these four websites cause a problem? How can it be mitigated? We can't refer the visitor to another website to get the product information as this will break the user experience, and of course shopping cart sessions will not pass on.
Content Development | | Rebecca.Holloway0 -
Duplicate Content Discovery
I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape. My question is should I be worried about the footer? Is 28% a lot?
Content Development | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i have a serious problem. I work in joomla and sometimes it can be annoying. When you set up a category, you need to give it a name and maybe this is a huge error on my part as i did not really think about the names beforehand. The situation i have now is, all my sections are in front page mode, but because you have to name the categories in order to write articles, i am now left with a load of blog sections such as http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news Now i have a main section called Benidorm news so i have duplicate sections, i want to know if i can redirect the http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news to go to the main benidorm section or if there is a better way of doing it. i have left this blod layout the way it is to show you, but the others i just have it where it shows the title and then goes to the article. I work in k2 and would be grateful if anyone can let me know the solution to this as semoz is showing that i have many duplicate titles and content many thanks
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sourcing content and images for Office Interior Design Blog
Im currently building a blog on Wordpress, and I will be blogging about Office Interior Designs. When I look at my competition they have some great blog posts about office interior designs and I have no idea about how they get: a) The ideas to blog about, how do they find out about these office interior designs b) how they get the content for them, how do they know what to write about each one, do they need permission etc, c) if i am interested in doing a blog on the same office interior design as them, how can I get information )and permission from the company that done the office interior design) on the office interior design so i can blog about it and also how do i get the images and stuff. an example is http://www.officedesignblog.com/invensys-rail-office-concept/726/ I would like to cover this aswell, as i think my future readers would like to know about this. how did they get the images, and the information about the project so they could write a blog post about it? And how would I go about doing the same thing?
Content Development | | CompleteOffice1 -
Blog content practices for e-commerce sites
What is the best practice in regards to content for e-commerce blogs on the same domain as the web-store (blog.storename.com)? What balance of content should be on the blog vs. the item & section pages or doesn't it matter?
Content Development | | MEldridge0