Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
-
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in.
They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area.
I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue.
So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages).
Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
-
Hi James,
The way this was done is not good, but the idea is right. If the client has 14 different offices, it is a standard best practice to create a unique page for each of them, and, yes, that means unique content. too. Rather than dealing with re-directs and rels, my advice is to reconsider your stance on creating meaningful content for each page. You just need to find a unique story to tell for each page. If the client is a service business, then doubtless, he's got a unique story from each service area to share. Put a minimum of 400 engaging words together, put the complete NAP(name, address, phone), a map of the service area, 5-10 local testimonials, maybe a video of the client at work in the local area and, bingo, you've now got a strong page that's been locally optimized for the community it serves.
Are you sure this isn't an option? It will take some effort/funding, but the business needs to understand the importance of taking a high quality approach to presenting themselves on the web, or they are going to be overrun by competitors who are willing to make these efforts.
-
Hi James,
you in fact come up with the answer I would have suggested.
One thing to think about is the purpose of why these pages come into existence and why it was a tactic 10+ years ago...
The reason I would think is.. keywords.
Croydon Lift Repair
Essex Lift Repair
London Lift Repair
....Depending on the clients website and using my example service, if they happened to have a very strong presence for the keyword lift repair, then you probably could easily incorporate those longer keywords London Lift Repair onto the main lift repair page and simply canonical the subpages.
If they don't have a strong presence on the root keyword (lift repair) but do show good results for the longer keyword results (London Lift Repair), then all you have to really worry about is 14 pages of content. Which in the scheme of a website is not that much.
I would think that it would be a good idea to include, content, physical address's phone numbers, map results on this page. Also if possible, contact some of the clients and ask them if it is okay get their opinion and thoughts on the service that was provided and use that as "What Others Are Saying". section on these pages. If they are hesitant maybe offer their business a free follow link, which could sway them in the right direction. From there you could talk about the unique things about each branch, could be employees, service equipment, local community involvements, clients, high profile contracts etc...)
The short is you're on the right track and I hope my thoughts helped you get on.
Don
-
Re-reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
I don't think I have any choice except to use rel=canonical tags and work at improving page content. Adapting this question to ask the speculative "how much does duplicate content hurt my ranking"
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
-
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
Long list of companies spread out over several pages - duplicate content?
Hi all, I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future. Here are two pages as examples: http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1# http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1# Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD&number=06630333#.U8PW6_ldX1s Thanks in advance Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | AaronGro0 -
Sudden Drop in Rankings/Traffic/Organic Impressions Without a Penalty
Hi Moz community! I have a question about a local client in Raleigh, NC - http://paragonbuildinggroup.com This client came to us from another agency who had previously not done such a great job with the design/development of the site, or with the marketing of it, so we are somewhat limited in terms of what we can do on design, user experience, etc. But, the SEO is all still easy to tweak and we've been working on it for some time now. As of July 5th, their keyword rankings have dropped dramatically (we're talking from first page rankings to nothing, according to Authority Labs), and they've fallen completely off the map in the SERPs. Their local listing doesn't appear in search results anymore, and WMT is showing a drastic drop in impressions (from 457 on July 3rd to 92 on July 5th). There have been no manual penalties on the site, no recent major development work done, and from what I can see, no signs of hacking and no bad backlinks. The only thing I can see is that Mozcast showed an 83 degree day with some clouds and rain on July 5th, the day that our rankings dropped off, but I can't find any documentation showing what might have changed. Any insight as to what might be going on? I'm completely stumped!
On-Page Optimization | | TriMarkDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Again
Hello Good People. I know that this is another duplicate post about duplicate content (boring) but i am going crazy with this.. SeoMoz crawl and other tools tells me that i have a duplicate content between site root and index.html. The site is www.sisic-product.com i am going crazy with this... the server is IIS so cannot use htaccess please help... thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Makumbala0 -
Duplicate Content from on Competitor's site?
I've recently discovered large blocks of content on a competitors site that has been copy and pasted from a client's site. From what I know, this will only hurt the competitor and not my client since my guy was the original. Is this true? Is there any risk to my client? Should we take action? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | Dino640 -
Depreciated content - Canononical, 301, or noindex?
I have a page that has existed on our website for many years, without ever being updated.This is what I would consider an "evergreen" content page, but it is now considered out of date and depreciated. It was never ranking high for any keyword in particular, but it is a page that has existed for many years. We have now created a more up-to-date version of the page, with much more informative content, a new URL, and of course it is SEO optimized. I am puzzled as to what I should do with my old page. Should I add a canononical link pointing it to the new updated page, or should I 301 redirect it to the new page, or should I no-index the old page? What are your thoughts and suggestions? I can give more information if needed. Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | jcph0 -
SEO pluses/minuses of Content used in pop-up windows
I am curious to know what advantages/disadvantages there are to placing content in pop-up windows ( lightbox, etc.). My understanding is that the content can be heavily optimized, but if a user lands on the page where the content is, how will they find it if it is hidden within a pop-up? I guess it is more a of a user experience issue rather than an SEO issue? or not? Hopefully that makes sense. Gary
On-Page Optimization | | Apptixweb0