Duplicate content - what to do?

[rasmusbang]

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

[rasmusbang]

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

[loopyal]

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.

[Vahe.Arabian]

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

[eyepaq]

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