Is duplicate content harmful? Example from on my site
-
I'm not talking about content copied from another site but content unique to a site being used on several pages.
I have a delivery tab that has precisely the same content as another product page. This content is on four product pages and the dedicated delivery page.
Thanks
-
One possible option would be to pull-in the duplicate content (shipping info) via an iframe on every page, so the content doesn't actually live on the page.
That being said, you have a lot of unique content on each page, and I don't think the duplicated content on these pages would be a problem.
-
That's the thing, these are the worst performing pages and I'm exploring possible reasons.
-
If the duplicated content is only part of the overall page, and the rest of the page is basically unique and different, I wouldn't worry too much. That said, watch rankings and traffic to these pages. If it seems to be lower than expected or it seems that it isn't growing as much as other parts of the site you might want to make it more unique.
-
Hi Matthew
They aren't duplicated pages but they contain duplicate content.
Most of the content on the four product pages is unique, but each page has duplicate delivery information in a tab.
-
Hi,
In general, yes, duplicate content is not good and can be harmful to your site. There are many reasons why this is true, but in terms of search it can be bad because it can divide the focus.
Let's say those four pages that are duplicated on your site are really important pages. You want those pages to rank and get traffic. By having duplicate content, you are dividing the focus across multiple pages. You'll have links going to all those pages, instead of all those links going to one page (internal and external). The same is true of social shares (to whatever extent that influences search). This makes your job that much harder to optimize those pages because you are dividing the focus across all four pages when really you should put all the focus behind one page.
Obviously, there are other issues beyond search. Duplicated pages can be bad for usability and can be a sign of an architecture that needs to be re-worked.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Will I have duplicate content on my own website?
Hello Moz community, We are an agency providing services to various industries, and among them the hair salon industry. On our website, we have our different service pages in the main menu, as usual. These service pages are general information and apply to any industry.We also have a page on the website that is only intended for the hair salon industry. On this page, we would like to link new service pages: they will be the same services as our “general” services, but specialized for hair salons. My questions relate to duplicate content: Do we have to make the new individual service pages for hair salons with completely different text, even though it’s the same service, in order to avoid having duplicate content? Can we just change a few words from the “general service” page to specifically target hair salons, and somehow avoid Google seeing it as duplicate content? Reminder that these pages will be internal links inside of the hair salon industry page. Thank you in advance for your answers, Gaël
On-Page Optimization | | Gael_Regnault0 -
Some Content The Same
Hello. I am about to publish some landing pages that target different industries that we are trying to market to. X for Accountants
On-Page Optimization | | smithandco
X for Financial Advisors
X for Fitness Trainers
X for X While a good portion of the content is unique on each page "the benefits of using X for accountants" some of the content on the page is duplicate which explains more about how our software works (the features), this will be the same content on every page. Is this considered duplicate content? What should I be aware of in term of Google rankings and penalties? Thanks,
David0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hey Moz Community, Newbie here. On my second week of Moz and I love it but have a couple questions regarding crawl errors. I have two questions: 1. I have a few pages with duplicate content but it say 0 duplicate URL's. How do I know what is duplicated in this instance? 2. I'm not sure if anyone here is familiar with an IDX for a real estate website. But I have this setup on my site and it seems as though all the links it generates for different homes for sale show up as duplicate pages. For instance, http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258 is listed as having duplicate page content compared with 7 duplicate URLS: http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78247
On-Page Optimization | | HandyRealtySA
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78253
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78245
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78261
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260 I've attached a screenshot that shows 2 of the pages that state duplicate page content but have 0 duplicate URLs. Also you can see somewhat about the idx duplicate pages. rel="canonical" is functioning on these pages, or so it seems when I view the source code from the page. Any help is greatly appreciated. skitch.png0 -
Social Media Profile and Website content dupe content issues ?
Is there a dupe content issue if your social media profiles and website have same content/copy ? For example if you have written great copy for your website home page then literally copy & paste that into your G+ co page introduction (since sums everything up perfectly and don't want to change it) would that have a negative effect or be perfectly ok ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Is there a way to tell Google a site has duplicated content?
Hello, We are joining 4 of our sites, into 1 big portal, and the content from each site gonna be inside this portal and sold as a package. We don't wanna kill these sites we are joining at this moment, we just wanna import their content into the new site and in a few months we will be killing them. Is there a way to tell Google to not consider the content on these small sites, so the new site don't get penalised? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | darkmediagroup0 -
Duplicated Content with joomla multi language website
Dear Seomoz Community I am running a multi language joomla website (www.siam2nite.com) with 2 active languages. The first and primary language is english. the second language is thai. Most of the content (articles, event descriptions ...) is in english only. What we did is a thai translation for the navigation bars, headers, titles etc (translation of all joomla language files) those texts are static and only help the user navigate / understand our site in their thai language. Now I facing a problem with duplicated content. Lets take our Q&A component as example. the url structure looks like this: english - www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/ thai - www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/ Every question asked will create two URL, one for each language. The content itself (user questions & answers) is identical on both URL's. Only the GUI language is different. If you take a look at this question you will understand what i mean: ENGLISH VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok THAI VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok As you can see each page has a unique title (H1) and introduction text in the correct language (same for menu, buttons, etc.) but the questions and answers are only available in one language. Now my question 😉 I guess Google will see this pages as duplicated content. How should I proceed with this problem: put all thai links /th/questions/ in the robots.txt and block them or make a canonical tag for the english versions? Not sure if I set a canonical tag google will still index the thai title and introduction texts (they have important thai keywords in them) Would really appreciate your help on this 😉 Regards, Menelik
On-Page Optimization | | menelik0 -
Suggestions to avoid duplicate content
Hi, we have about 6500 products, almost all with descriptions. SEOMOZ is showing about 2500 of them with duplicate content. The reason for this is that only one or two words are different for each product. For example, we have 500 award certificates. All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate. We have the same issue with our trophies - they are identical, except for figures. Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items? Thanks! Neil trophycentral.com
On-Page Optimization | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0