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?
-
Completely agree with Ryan - assuming it's not the first sentence or an extremely short article you're absolutely fine.
Duplicate lines are very common - most notably as a quote (think how many times you see this in news publications).
-
I agree with Ryan.
No. It's not going to hurt you.
-
Generally speaking, one line of duplicate content will not negatively impact the SERP performance of a web page.
A couple instances where a page could be affected:
-
the duplicated sentence is the first sentence of the article
-
the article is very short (i.e. <100 words)
It is common practice for a single sentence to be duplicated elsewhere.
-
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
-
Partial duplicate content (reviews) on product pages - is this ok?
Hello, we recently received some really good reviews about a range of products we sell (there are normally 8 products in a range). Due to the industry we are in it made no sense to try and get reviews on each individual product within the range as they differ only ever so slightly. So my question is we want to add these reviews to each of the 8 products that lie within each range, but by adding them it would mean that each page has around 600 words of unique product description followed by approx 600 words of reviews that are the same on each of the products within that range. Is this ok? my only other option would be to screenshot the reviews and upload them as images below each product description. If anyone could offer advice here that would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | livs20130 -
Duplicate Tag Content Mystery
Hello Moz Communtiy! i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like: http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/ http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/ Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this? Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one? If you have any video basis on it, i will recommend.
Technical SEO | | navneetkumar7860 -
What is the best way to handle these duplicate page content errors?
MOZ reports these as duplicate page content errors and I'm not sure the best way to handle it. Home
Technical SEO | | ElykInnovation
http://myhjhome.com/
http://myhjhome.com/index.php Blog
http://myhjhome.com/blog/
http://myhjhome.com/blog/?author=1 Should I just create 301 redirects for these? 301 http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com/ ? 301 http://myhjhome.com/blog/?author=1 to http://myhjhome.com/ ? Or is there a better way to handle this type of duplicate page content errors? and0 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Where to put content on the page? - technical
The new algo update says any images at the top of the page negatively affect user experience if they are adverts? how does google know if its an advert or relevant banner? When trying to put text as far up as possible on the page, is it ok to make it appear higher in the code but appear further down using css? Or does Google not go from the code top to bottom when working this out, more how it renders? Any advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How do I fix Duplicate Content/Title going to memberlist.php page?
I have over 6,000 duplicate title and duplicate content errors going to this link: http://community.mautofied.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=100299 How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | mautofied0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0