Dealing with duplicate content
-
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites.
What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms.
Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away.
Any thoughts?
-
Thanks Gerd, Marisa & Nakul. All good feedback. I asked this yesterday with another layer pertaining to mobile and I think it complicated the question too much for anyone to understand or answer.
product.com/shop is the ideal solution and that will require the investment in a new "product.com". Forgoing the SERP for buyproduct.com is likely the best option anyways considering it will be gone once investment is made.
Appreciate your responses.
-
I agree with Gerd and Marisa. I would recommend you to consider doing a Cross Domain canonical tag on your buyproduct.com product pages and any other duplicate content to your product.com pages or vice versa, depending upon whichever one you want to keep in the search engines.
Since both your websites have strength and our gaining the SERPS (which does not guarantee that they can't fall tomorrow for getting penalized for duplicate content), I would suggest you take the opportunity to put a plan and strategy together and get this taken care of sooner then later.
-
It seems as though combining the sites is your best option. If that is your long term goal, then spending countless time writing new content for one of them seems like a waste, especially if their rankings aren't suffering. However, that could change overnight, so I'd suggest to try to find a way to put combining them higher on your priority list. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but that is what I'd do if I were in your situation. I know you say it's not in your budget, but what's your budget going to look like if your site gets hit by the next Panda?
-
Are you able to change the domain of buyproduct.com to shop.product.com and then have the shop's product pages and content which is duplicate have the same canonical? Not ideal as your shop would not feature any content.
If you are able to rework buyproduct.com then I would change the product page structure, enrich with hproduct data and other relevant markup (reviews).
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
-
Dealing with Expired & Reoccurring Content At Scale
Hello, I have a question concerning maintenance & pruning content with a large site that has a ton of pages that are either expired OR reoccurring. Firstly, there's ~ 12,000 pages on the site. They have large sections of the site that have individual landing pages for time-sensitive content, such as promotions and shows. They have TONS of shows every day, so the # of page to manage keeps exponentially increasing. Show URLs: I'm auditing the show URLs and looking at pages that have backlinks. With those, I am redirecting to the main show pages.
Technical SEO | | triveraseo
-However, there are significant # of show URLs that are from a few years ago (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) that DON'T get traffic or have any backlinks (or ranking keywords). Can I delete these pages entirely from the site, or should I go through the process of 410-ing them (and then deleting? or ...?)Can you let 410's sit?)? They are in the XML sitemap right now, so they get crawled, but are essentially useless, and I want to cut off the dead weight, but I'm worried about deleting a large # of pages from the site at once. For show URLs that are still obsolete, but rank well in terms of kewyords and get some traffic...is there any recommended option? Should I bother adding them to a past shows archive section or not since they are bringing in a LITTLE traffic? Or ax them since it's such a small amount of traffic compared to what they get from the main pages. There are URLs that are orphaned and obsolete right now, but will reoccur. For instance, when an artist performs, they get their own landing page, they may acquire some backlinks and rank, but then that artist doesn't come back for a few months. The page just sits there, orphaned and in the XML sitemap. However, regardless of back-links/keywords, the page will come back eventually. Is there any recommended way to maintain this kind of situation? Again, there are a LOT of URLs in this same boat. Promotional URLs: I'm going about the same process for promotions and thankfully, the scale of hte issue is much less. However, same question as above...they have some promotional URLs, like NYE Special Menu landing pages or Lent-Specials, etc, for each of their restaurants. These pages are only valid for a short amount of time each year, and otherwise, are obsolete. I want to reuse the pages each year, though, but don't want them to just sit there in the XML sitemap. Is there ever an instance where I might want to 302 redirect them, and then remove the 302 for the short amount of time they are valid? I'm not AS concerned about the recycled promotional URLs. There are much fewer URLs in this category. However, as you can probably tell, this large site has this problem of reoccurring content throughout, and I'd like to get a plan in place to clean it up and then create rules to maintain. Promotional URLs that reoccur are smaller, so if they are orphaned, not the end of the world, but there are thousands of show URLs with this issue, so I really need to determine the best play here. Any help is MUCH appreciated!0 -
URL slash creating duplicate content
Hi All, I currently have an issue whereby by domain name (just homepage) has: mydomain.com and: mydomain.com/ Moz crawler flags this up as duplicate content - does anyone know of a way I can fix this? Thanks! Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
"Daily Special" = Duplicate Content?
I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient: We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure: www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html. We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended: www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html ** Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RScime250 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
Mod Rewrite question to prevent duplicate content
Hi, I'm having problems with a mod rewrite issue and duplicate content On my website I have Website.com Website.com/directory Website.com/directory/Sub_directory_more_stuff_here Both #1 and #2 are the same page (I can't change this). #3 is different pages. How can I use mod rewrite to to make #2 redirect to #1 so I don't have duplicate content WHILE #3 still works?
Technical SEO | | kat20 -
Duplicate Content -->?ss=facebook
Hi there, When searching site:mysite.com my keyword I found the "same page" twice in the SERP's. The URL's look like this: Page 1: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm Page 2: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm**?ss=facebook** The ?ss=facebook is caused by a bookmark button inserted in some of our product pages. My question is... will the canonical tag do to solve this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15565529539090 -
Duplicate content
I have to sentences that I want to optimize to different pages for. sentence number one is travel to ibiza by boat sentence number to is travel to ibiza by ferry My question is, can I have the same content on both pages exept for the keywords or will Google treat that as duplicate content and punish me? And If yes, where goes the limit/border for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | stlastla0