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
-
Magento products and eBay - duplicate content risk?
Hi, We are selling about 1000 sticker products in our online store and would like to expand a large part of our products lineup to eBay as well. There are pretty good modules for this as I've heard. I'm just wondering if there will be duplicate content problems if I sync the products between Magento and eBay and they get uploaded to eBay with identical titles, descriptions and images? What's the workaround in this case? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Duplicate content reported on WMT for 301 redirected content
We had to 301 redirect a large number of URL's. Not Google WMT is telling me that we are having tons of duplicate page titles. When I looked into the specific URL's I realized that Google is listing an old URL's and the 301 redirected new URL as the source of the duplicate content. I confirmed the 301 redirect by using a server header tool to check the correct implementation of the 301 redirect from the old to the new URL. Question: Why is Google Webmaster Tool reporting duplicated content for these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAccount320 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
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 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to prevent duplicate content within this complex website?
I have a complex SEO issue I've been wrestling with and I'd appreciate your views on this very much. I have a sports website and most visitors are looking for the games that are played in the current week (I've studied this - it's true). We're creating a new website from scratch and I want to do this is as best as possible. We want to use the most elegant and best way to do this. We do not want to use work-arounds such as iframes, hiding text using AJAX etc. We need a solid solution for both users and search engines. Therefor I have written down three options: Using a canonical URL; Using 301-redirects; Using 302-redirects. Introduction The page 'website.com/competition/season/week-8' shows the soccer games that are played in game week 8 of the season. The next week users are interested in the games that are played in that week (game week 9). So the content a visitor is interested in, is constantly shifting because of the way competitions and tournaments are organized. After a season the same goes for the season of course. The website we're building has the following structure: Competition (e.g. 'premier league') Season (e.g. '2011-2012') Playweek (e.g. 'week 8') Game (e.g. 'Manchester United - Arsenal') This is the most logical structure one can think of. This is what users expect. Now we're facing the following challenge: when a user goes to http://website.com/premier-league he expects to see a) the games that are played in the current week and b) the current standings. When someone goes to http://website.com/premier-league/2011-2012/ he expects to see the same: the games that are played in the current week and the current standings. When someone goes to http://website.com/premier-league/2011-2012/week-8/ he expects to the same: the games that are played in the current week and the current standings. So essentially there's three places, within every active season within a competition, within the website where logically the same information has to be shown. To deal with this from a UX and SEO perspective, we have the following options: Option A - Use a canonical URL Using a canonical URL could solve this problem. You could use a canonical URL from the current week page and the Season page to the competition page: So: the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-8' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/' the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/' The next week however, you want to have the canonical tag on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-9' and the canonical tag from 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-8' should be removed. So then you have: the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-9' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/' the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/' would still have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/' In essence the canonical tag is constantly traveling through the pages. Advantages: UX: for a user this is a very neat solution. Wherever a user goes, he sees the information he expects. So that's all good. SEO: the search engines get very clear guidelines as to how the website functions and we prevent duplicate content. Disavantages: I have some concerns regarding the weekly changing canonical tag from a SEO perspective. Every week, within every competition the canonical tags are updated. How often do Search Engines update their index for canonical tags? I mean, say it takes a Search Engine a week to visit a page, crawl a page and process a canonical tag correctly, then the Search Engines will be a week behind on figuring out the actual structure of the hierarchy. On top of that: what do the changing canonical URLs to the 'quality' of the website? In theory this should be working all but I have some reservations on this. If there is a canonical tag from 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8', what does this do to the indexation and ranking of it's subpages (the actual match pages) Option B - Using 301-redirects Using 301-redirects essentially the user and the Search Engine are treated the same. When the Season page or competition page are requested both are redirected to game week page. The same applies here as applies for the canonical URL: every week there are changes in the redirects. So in game week 8: the page on 'website.com/$competition/' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8' the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8' A week goes by, so then you have: the page on 'website.com/$competition/' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9' the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9' Advantages There is no loss of link authority. Disadvantages Before a playweek starts the playweek in question can be indexed. However, in the current playweek the playweek page 301-redirects to the competition page. After that week the page's 301-redirect is removed again and it's indexable. What do all the (changing) 301-redirects do to the overall quality of the website for Search Engines (and users)? Option C - Using 302-redirects Most SEO's will refrain from using 302-redirects. However, 302-redirect can be put to good use: for serving a temporary redirect. Within my website there's the content that's most important to the users (and therefor search engines) is constantly moving. In most cases after a week a different piece of the website is most interesting for a user. So let's take our example above. We're in playweek 8. If you want 'website.com/$competition/' to be redirecting to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8/' you can use a 302-redirect. Because the redirect is temporary The next week the 302-redirect on 'website.com/$competition/' will be adjusted. It'll be pointing to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9'. Advantages We're putting the 302-redirect to its actual use. The pages that 302-redirect (for instance 'website.com/$competition' and 'website.com/$competition/$season') will remain indexed. Disadvantages Not quite sure how Google will handle this, they're not very clear on how they exactly handle a 302-redirect and in which cases a 302-redirect might be useful. In most cases they advise webmasters not to use it. I'd very much like your opinion on this. Thanks in advance guys and galls!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenvanVessum0 -
I try to apply best duplicate content practices, but my rankings drop!
Hey, An audit of a client's site revealed that due to their shopping cart, all their product pages were being duplicated. http://www.domain.com.au/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/ and http://www.domain.com.au/shop/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/ The easiest solution was to just block all /shop/ pages in Google Webmaster Tools (redirects were not an easy option). This was about 3 months ago, and in months 1 and 2 we undertook some great marketing (soft social book marking, updating the page content, flickr profiles with product images, product manuals onto slideshare etc). Rankings went up and so did traffic. In month 3, the changes in robots.txt finally hit and rankings decreased quite steadily over the last 3 weeks. Im so tempted to take off the robots restriction on the duplicate content.... I know I shouldnt but, it was working so well without it? Ideas, suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0