Duplicate Footer Content
-
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page.
What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution?
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-
We currently have footer content contained in a single php include file and is included in every page and contains the following:
-
Most recent 3 tweets from our twitter feed
-
Snippets of our 3 most recent blogs posts
-
navigation links to our main pages (essentially the same as our main navigation in the header)
Is this bad practice for footer content?
-
-
If it can be useful copy that is unique to every page, it might make sense to do it. If not, it might be easier to just convert it into an image as Streamline recommended and instead add other copy on the page that is more in sync with what the page is about.
Presuming that copy in the middle is something like "Why Buy From Us" kind of thing, how many different ways can you really write it, at the same time being useful to the user.
-
Yeah, it is about 40 pages. So... I think we will just have to rewrite the content. He does want to rank these pages. They are actually ranking in the top 10 now with about 80% dup content.
thanks for the help!
-
If you can rewrite the text on each page, then that's what I would do. But if the site has thousands of pages and it's not possible to rewrite the content on every single page, then I'd suggest either moving each section of text to its own dedicated page (like History would be its own page with its own link in the navigation) OR if you think the content is important enough to be seen on every page, then you could try putting the text as an image...
Your site won't necessarily be penalized for having the same text on every page but you certainly won't benefit from it since the key is to make every single page as unique and high quality as possible.
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
-
Duplicate content : domain alias issue
Hello there ! Let's say my client has 2 webshops (that exists since long time, so many backlinks & good authority on both) : individuals.nl : for individuals (has 200 backlinks, let's say) pros.nl : exact same products, exact same content, but with a different branding intended to professionnals (has 100 backlinks, let's say) So, both websites are 99% identical and it has to remain like that !!! Obviously, this creates duplicate content issues. Goal : I want "individuals.nl" to get all ranking value (while "pros.nl" should remain accessible through direct access & appear on it's own brand queries). Solution ? Implement canonical tags on "pros**.nl**" that goes to "individuals.nl". That way, "individuals.nl" will get all ranking value, while "pros.nl" will still be reachable through direct access. However, "individuals.nl" will then replace "pros.nl" from SERP in the long-term. The only thing I want is to keep "pros.nl" visible for its own brand queries -> it won't be possible through organic search result, so, I'm just gonna buy those "pros" queries through paid search ! Put links on all pages of pros.nl to individuals.nl (but not the other way around), so that "pros.nl" will pass some ranking value to "individuals.nl" (but only a small part of the ranking value -> ideally, I would like to pass all link value to this domain). Could someone advise me ??? (I know it sound a bit complicated... but I don't have much choice ^^)
Technical SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate content due to credit card testing
I recently launched a site - http://www.footballtriviaquestions.co.uk and the site uses Paypal. In order to test the PayPal functionality I set up a zapto.org domain via a permanent IP service that points directly to the computer I've written the website on. It appears that Google has now indexed the zapto.org website. Will this cause problems to my main website, as the zapto.org website will pretty much contain content that is an exact duplicate of what is held on the main website. I've looked in Google webmaster tools for the main website and it doesn't mention any duplicate content, but I'm currently not in the top 50 ranking for "football trivia questions' on Google despite SEOMoz ranking my home page with an A rating. The page does rank at position 16 in Yahoo and Bing. This seems odd to me, although I do have very few back links pointing to my site. If the duplicate content is likely to be causing me problems what would be the best way to knock the zapto.org results out of Google
Technical SEO | | ipr1010 -
Taking descriptions from Manufacturer sites and Duplicate content
We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley1 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
How do I fix duplicate content with the home page?
This is probably SEO 101, but I'm unsure what to do here... Last week my weekly crawl diagnostics were off the chart because http:// was not resolving to http://www...fixed that but now it's saying I have duplicate content on: http://www.......com http://www.......com/index.php How do I fix this? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jgower0