Duplicate content
-
I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April.
However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues.
If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it.
I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index?
But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so.
For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash to use it you need to have Flash installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site!
Thanks,
Ian
-
I don't have any experience with Cloudflare so I can't offer an opinion on their services. And without a proper audit of your site and link profile, there is no honest way to know exactly what the core issues are on the site. Short of a proper audit, it's all a guess. That's the bigger concern.
Maybe it's links. Maybe its duplicate content perception. Maybe it's a dozen seemingly insignificant issues that accumulated to the breaking point with a trigger event like Penguin.
Unfortunately that's the reality of SEO in 2012.
-
ok, maybe I'm not getting something or not explaining myself properly.
When I say things like "30000 times", "every page" and "it is the majority of the content" in the context that I have in my head I'm saying its not a trivial thing and I have looked into it at length.
If you thought there was some verification needed to answer the question the information is there to have a look.
Complex things are made up of lots of uncomplex things.
How strong is this site? Up until April I'd say very strong, it came in at number 1 for several high volume keywords (still does in bing and yahoo)
As I said in the original question I have decided to redo most of the content on this site anyway so whether this whole issue is an issue or not isn't an issue.
The original question was how do you prevent it happening again? Is rel author rel-publisher and g+ the answer?
or what about this? http://www.cloudflare.com/plans
-
"it is the majority of my content". that's what I asked originally - if it is the majority of content on individual pages. If that's true, it could be a cause of problems, however SEO is an extremely complex process with multiple algorithms so unfortunately, without a detailed review of the site, it's dangerous to assume that specific issue is the cause of your problems.
How strong is your site in other regards? Do you implement rel-author or rel-publisher code and tie it to a Google+ account to communicate you're the original source? Do you have enough other trust signals in place? There are many other similar questions that need to be answered before anyone can confidently make serious recommendations.
-
1. Google doesn't seem to know this and has penalised my sites for something.
2. It is the majority of the content. Its pretty much all of it, upto 30000 times.
3. I've lost 70% of my traffic via recent Google updates. That is THE over whelming concern which is why I came and joined this site.
I arrived at this point by asking this question http://www.seomoz.org/q/penguin-issues if you disagree with the track I got sent on can you suggest a different one?
-
1. you're not generating the duplicate content so there's nothing you can logically do about on any kind of a scalable frequency, let alone prevent.
2. If it's not the majority of content on a page, it's not a serious problem. In fact, it's common to the internet.
3. Don't allow non-issues become an overwhelming concern. Focus on what you can do something about, and things that are more important and really do have a negative impact on your SEO that are within you control.
-
OK but the snippet is an exact match (in speech marks) and there's 30000 of them that's not just monkeys typing Shakespeare. Every page (300 or so) on that site has unique content and more or less each page has upto 30000 duplicates, most a lot less that 30000 but a lot more that 1, which it should be. If there was a couple of coincidences, fine, but there's not.
-
Just finding a snippet that's as short as the examples you gave is not a reason to be concerned about duplicate content in itself. A typical page should have hundreds of words and rank for whatever phrase or phrases you care about, not for a single sentence within the content.
If, on the other hand, you have the overwhelming majority of the content from one of your pages duplicated, that's a reason to be concerned.
So - how much content do you have on YOUR site on the page(s) in question? And have you checked to find out if the majority is duplicated? That's where the focus needs to be.
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
-
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Duplicate content issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Does Google View "SRC", "HREF", TITLE and Alt tags as Duplicate Content on Home Page Slider?
Greetings MOZ Community. A keyword matrix was developed by my SEO firm. I am in the process of integrating primary, secondary and terciary phrases into the text and am also sprinkling three or four other terms. Using a keyword density tool (http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) the results were somewhat unexpected after I optimized. So I then looked at the source code and noticed text from HREF, ALT and SRC tags that may be effecting how Google would interpret text on the page. Our home page (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains a slider with commercial real estate listings. Would Google index the SRC, HREF, TITLE and ALT tags in these slider items? Would this be detrimental to SEO? The code for one listing (and there are 7-8 in the slider) looks like this: | href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York">Class A Fifth Avenue Offices class="blockLeft"><a< p=""></a<> href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York"> src="http://dr0nu3l9a17ym.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/fsrep/houses/125x100/305.jpg" alt="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York" width="125" height="94" /> 1,340 Sq. Ft. $5,918 / month Fifth Avenue Midtown / Grand Central <a< p=""></a<> | Could the repetition of the title text ("lease a Prestigious Fifth...") trigger a duplicate content penalty? Should the slider content be blocked or set to no-index by some kind of a Java script? We have worked very hard to optimize the home page so it would be a real shame if through some technical oversight we got hit by a Google Panda penalty. Thanks, Alan Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0