Local Search | Website Issue with Duplicate Content (97 pages)
-
Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page.
Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page.
Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?
-
Thank you Miriam.
-
Thanks Miriam!
-
Hi Todd, I'm endorsing Kevin's response as a best answer on this, but also want to add that it will be easier on the client if he makes a plan now to begin to improve the content of key pages rather than scramble to do so after rankings suddenly fall off. Local rankings are in a constant state of flux...drops can happen so swiftly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I would identify the 10 most important cities and write unique content for them, then move on to the 10 next-most important and so on. Do it in a way the client can afford, at a velocity you can manage.
-
Good morning Kevin - most of the individual pages receive little traffic. Thank you for your advice and feedback.
-
Hi Daniel - thank you for response and advice!
-
Hi Todd,
How much traffic is each of those pages getting? Chances are if you look at them over 50% of them are getting little if any traffic. As you know, ranking on the first page in local search really doesn't mean much. You need to be in the top 3 (or 3-5 if maps is displaying results).
My advice would be to help the client focus on the best areas (Based on traffic, demographics, distance, etc.) and the ones that are currently driving traffic then create unique content for each of those pages. This could also bring down the too many links per page signal.
I did this with one of my clients and their rank improved to where they were #1 & #2 for their top 10 areas that were driving 90% of their traffic. If they want to continue targeting all 97 each page should have unique content. Their rankings will definitely improve if done right.
Anyways, I know it's a balancing act of the best strategy and what the clients budget will allow you to do so in the end you have to make the best decision.
Cheers,
Kevin
-
I myself have done this for many clients. I have used a generic paragraph with near duplicate content on over 3000+ pages for one client and it has been going strong for many years. I have also tested websites with near 100% duplicate body text with exception to title, description, h1, image alts and they are ranking good as well with no problems.
I would advise the client of the risk of having duplicate content. You could use textbroker to write some content for each page at around $5 each just to be safe and to feel comfortable moving forward with SEO.
Most of my clients have come to me from other SEO's and I'm always wondering what will drop off when I optimize something because the work was clearly black/grey hat. The good thing is they know the value of SEO already and agree to pay to just fix old issues before moving forward most of the time.
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
-
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
.com & .ie website how to avoid duplicate blog content?
We have 2 websites .com & .ie (both are more or less identical except 2 different markets). How can I avoid duplicate blog content as lots of our .com/blog and .ie/blog is the same? Maybe.... Our main .com blog articles are searchable then on our .ie blog content non searchable? (This way both markets get to view the content but only Google actually searches our .com blog) Alliteratively I would need to rewrite each article so that is unique Advise would be appreciated, thank you.
Technical SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?
As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?
Technical SEO | | ewanTHH0 -
See any issues with this tabbed content page?
When I view source, and view as Googlebot it's showing as 1 long page of content = good. However, the developer uses some redirects and dynamic page generation to pull this off. I didn't see any issues from a Search perspective but would appreciate a second opinion: Click here Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Avoiding duplicate content/same pages
hi I have been checking through all the Q and A but i i'm still not sure how you get http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html to be just http://www.domain.co.uk/? Do you add canonical to the index page to point to the page you prefer and then add a 301 redirect? thanks
Technical SEO | | challen0