Duplicate content - what to do?
-
Hi,
We have a whole lot of articles on our site. In total 5232 actually.
The web crawler tells me that in the articles we have a lot of duplicate content. Which is sort of nonsense, since each article is unique. Ah, some might have some common paragraphs because they are recurring news about a weekly competition.
But, an example:
http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/brandvarme-ailton-snupper-topscorerprisen
AND
http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/opdaterede-odds-pa-sportschef-situationen-pa-vestegnen
These are "duplicate content", however the two article texts are not the same. The menu, and the widgets are all the same, but highly relevant to the article.
So what should I do? How can i rid myself of these errors?
-Rasmus
-
So! Have now made some changes.
I have removed the large number of links at the bottom and a single widget on the right. It seems to have lowerede the level of noise on the page.
We brandish our articles with keywords (but mostly new ones since the feature is new) such that only relevant articles are linked (in a widget which appears when relevant articles are found).
This change should cut it, right?
-Rasmus
-
Rasmus,
Your description and keywords tags are exactly the same on both pages.
The description should be a summary of the content of each individual page
If you fix that, it may go some way towards fixing the problem.
If that doesn't help, then consider adding more text to those stories
- say a little more about each competitor, or at least the leader or the top 3.
Another thing you could consider is using a different template for that type of page, so you don't add all that stuff under the HR tag, and maybe drop off something from the right column, so the page is a little bit shorter and the story will be a larger percentage of the text.
You also have a lot of inline javascript and a lot of external javascripts.
I don't know if the bots or the ranking algorithms care, but it would be a lot nicer if you consolidated some of that.
-
Hey Rasmus,
The menu, widgets e.t.c all count as part of content as they are page elements, so ofcourse they would be considered.
This situation is abit tricky, however if you think you can merge them do so, maybe add slightly more content to each page; otherwise do nothing.
Just make sure and see whether both pages are ranking for the appropriate keywords.
Thanks,
Vahe
-
That is almost duplicate content. The % of the unique content on the two pages you've posted as example is small - only the actual content is different - the rest of the site wide boxes and boiler plates are the same.
So matematicly the difference in those two pages is very small.
The good thing is that you have the article in a good real estate location on the page - amnd that is good.
If your "score" as far as page views, Bounce rate, time on page, loyality is good then no need to worry about the crawler telling you about the duplicate issue. if the Bounce rate, time on page etc doesn't look good then yes, you nee dot worry about it.
My suggestion will be to cut out some or most of the boiler plate boxes in your site structure - it doesn't help you, it doesn't help your readers but it dose harm you with all those links per page as far as number (% of links vs text) and to be honest I am not 100% sure it helps your users with that aggressive approach: a lot of options.
Also there is a good approach not to use the same target for the link in the article as it doesn't counts - only the first one is taken in consideration as far as anchor text - as far as seo. If it has a good CTR then keep it but remember that even if only one counts as sending SEO signal (anchor text and link love) it dose count as far as number of links per page.
The bottom line is that if you cut about 50% of the boiler plates in those pages you will gain a lot of advantages for both the SEO side and you would also help your users (usability, navigation etc).
You don't have to take my advice for granted - do this for some of the articles and monitor ctr, serps for them and so on to see the improvements.
Hope it helps. If it didn't hopefully someone else will also post an opinion
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
-
Is minor duplicate content on my website okay?
I know duplicate content across multiple websites is not a good thing, however I've always wondered about minor duplicate content on your own website. I know its good practice to have unique content on each page but what about the little stuff. For example on our website certain related pages share the same content in a right sidebar. Such as links to pdf leaflets, or "you can read our blog etc" . Is there a minimum number of repeated words required before its flagged as duplicate content? Another example is a customer gave two testimonials for two of our employees - the testimonials were identical other than the employee names - if these were posted on separate pages is it a problem for the site as a whole or for both those individual pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Brabian0 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
Internal Duplicate Content/Canonical Issue/ or nothing to worry about
Unfortunately, my developer cannot give me an answer to this so I really do hope someone can help. The homepage of my website is http://www.laddersfree.co.uk however I also have a page http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/index.php that has a page rank and essentially duplicates the home page. Does someone know what this is? Do I need to get my developer to do a 404? It is worrying that he has not come back to me. Thanks Jason
On-Page Optimization | | gymmad0 -
Duplicate Content: Snippets from Blog on Website
Our company has a website and a blog, each on a separate domain. On our website's home page, we include snippets from some of our blog posts and links to such posts. The snippets include the same photo, title, and first line or so of text. We have been told and am concerned that search engines will categorize this as duplicate content. Any recommendation as to how we can get around this issue aside from not including the blog posts on our site? I imagine we are not the first company to want to do this. www.angelicolaw.com Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | BrazilLaw
Greg0 -
Duplicate Content - Delete it or NoIndex?
Last month I realized that one of my freelancers had been feeding my website with copied / spun content and sadly, there's lots of it. And of course it got my website to be hit hard by the last Panda update. Now that I've identified the content, what the best thing to do? Should I delete it permanently and get 404 errors or should I set the pages' robot meta tag to "nofollow"?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
How to avoid duplicates when URL and content changes during the course of a day?
I'm currently facing the following challenge: Newspaper industry: the content and title of some (featured) articles change a couple of times during a normal day. The CMS is setup so each article can be found by only using it's specific id (eg. domain.tld/123). A normal article looks like this: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-topic,123 Now the article gets changed and with it the topic. It looks like this now: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-new-topic,123 I can not tell the writers that they can not change the article as they wish any more. I could implement canonicals pointing to the short url (domain.tld/123). I could try to change the URL's to something like domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/123. Then we would lose keywords in URL (which afaik is not that important as a ranking factor; rather as a CTR factor). If anyone has experiences sharing them would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jan
On-Page Optimization | | jmueller0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
Duplicate content on area specific sites
I have created some websites for my company Dor-2-Dor and there is a main website where all of the information across the board is on (www.dor2dor.com) but I also have area specific sites which are for our franchisees who run certain areas around the country (www.swansea.dor2dor.com or www.oxford.dor2dor.com) The problem is that the content that is on a lot of the pages is the same on all of them for instance our faq's page, special offers etc. What is the best way to get these pages to rank well and not have the duplicate content issues and be ranked down by search engines? Any help will be greatly received.
On-Page Optimization | | D2DWeb0