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
-
Duplicated content & url's for e-commerce website
Hi, I have an e-commerce site where I sell greeting cards. Products are under different categories (birthday, Christmas etc) with subcategories (for Mother, for Sister etc) and same product can be under 3 or 6 subcategories, for example: url: .../greeting-cards/Christmas/product1/for-mother
Technical SEO | | jurginga
url:.../greeting-cards/Christmas/product1/for-sister
etc On the CMS I have one description record per each card (product1) with multiple subcategories attached that naturally creates URLs for subcategories. Moz system (and Google for sure) picks these urls (and content) as duplicated.
Any ideas how to solve this problem?
Thank you very much!0 -
Duplicate Page Errors
Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone can help... Here is my issue... Our website:
Technical SEO | | TCPReliable
http://www.cryopak.com
It's built on Concrete 5 CMS I'm noticing a ton of duplicate page errors (9530 to be exact). I'm looking at the issues and it looks like it is being caused by the CMS. For instance the home page seems to be duplicating.. http://www.cryopak.com/en/
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=25
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=4
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=66 Do you think this is an issue? Is their anyway to fix this issue? It seems to be happening on every page. Thanks Jim0 -
Advice on Duplicate Page Content
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them. For example - http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
Technical SEO | | jsmoz
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs We have many such pages. Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?0 -
Will one line of duplicate content drag down my landing page?
I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page. Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term? Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google. It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can. Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?
Technical SEO | | Ticket_King0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Duplicate content, how to solve?
I have about 400 errors about duplicate content on my seomoz dashboard. However I have no idea how to solve this, I have 2 main scenarios of duplication in my site: Scenario 1: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?name=64MB+SDRAM+DIMM+MEMORY+MODULE&sku=&price%5Bfrom%5D=&price%5Bto%5D=&category= 3 products with the same title, but different product models, as you can note is has the same price as well. Some printers use a different memory product module. So I just cant delete 2 products. Scenario 2: toners http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-73 http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-75 In this scenario, products have a different title but the same price. Again, in this scenario the 2 products are different. Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Internal website search
Hi, I'd like to index dynamically generated - internal website search pages - to Google. A mod rewrite to make the URL strings friendlier might be one way, but as these pages are created on the fly and effectively don't exist till the search keywords are inputted, is it even possible to index them? thanks
Technical SEO | | richcowley0