How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
-
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
-
I would not use a canonnical for your www v non www, use a 301
there is a tutorial there also to fix the index.html problem also, these tutorials are for micdrosoft iis server, if you have linux, you need to find the htaccess alternatives.
I always go for the non www, as www is of no use, so why have it, but for you i would look at what your links point to.
-
Hi Alan
Thankyou for taking the time to offer advice to me. I have read your pages and it does raise some interesting points. One that although basic, is one I haven't yet paid much attention to is the issue of "The choice of www or non-www".
This is interesting in respect of how I set my canonical tags up. I noticed that I rank differently for www.waspkilluk.co.uk than for www.waspkilluk.co.uk/index. So it seems I need to add a canonical tag there. I guess index is my home page - but then isn't the root domain also my default homepage?
In fact - do you think you should set up canonical tags without the www. or won't this work?
Sorry for creating questions from questions.
Warm Regards
Simon
-
Hi James
I have had a thorough study of this issue today and your ideas have proved fruitful. I checked out the article by Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ and then read the article by Rand Fishkin. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps.
it will take a few weeks to implement across the thousand or so pages I have, but it will be interesting to see how or if, it finally affects the root domains ranking.
Many thanks
Simon
-
James gives a good response.
i have a few tutorial pages, where a lot of the instuctions are the same, but the are still indexed and rank.
It maybe a guide of what you can get a way with
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-trailing-slash
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-upper-and-lower-case -
It is hard to give an accurate percentage, in my eyes if you want to be in the clear just make unique content on pages if it is not unique content then place a canonical tag to the right page.
I mean Google is coming down harder and harder on sites for poor quality content/duplicant content if you play by the rules and do things right tit will be a long term strategy.
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoelHer0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is. I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation. e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City] I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpecialCase0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
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 -
Subdomains - duplicate content - robots.txt
Our corporate site provides MLS data to users, with the end goal of generating leads. Each registered lead is assigned to an agent, essentially in a round robin fashion. However we also give each agent a domain of their choosing that points to our corporate website. The domain can be whatever they want, but upon loading it is immediately directed to a subdomain. For example, www.agentsmith.com would be redirected to agentsmith.corporatedomain.com. Finally, any leads generated from agentsmith.easystreetrealty-indy.com are always assigned to Agent Smith instead of the agent pool (by parsing the current host name). In order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, any page that is viewed on one of the agent subdomains always has a canonical link pointing to the corporate host name (www.corporatedomain.com). The only content difference between our corporate site and an agent subdomain is the phone number and contact email address where applicable. Two questions: Can/should we use robots.txt or robot meta tags to tell crawlers to ignore these subdomains, but obviously not the corporate domain? If question 1 is yes, would it be better for SEO to do that, or leave it how it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0