Duplicate Content Vs No Content
-
Hello!
A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?".
We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website.
We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here.
I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO?
Thanks!
-
If i strictly stay up to the question then i would go this way...
1. If the content is really awesome for for duplicate but always ad the canonical tag so that you do not die in the SE world.
2. If the content is just tons of words on the page to fill the container... its better to let the container go empty!
-
Hello Moosa,
Thanks for the advice. Based on your reply and the one above, I am going to look at implementing a user comment system tonight. However, I am also interested in any other ideas or general advice about no content vs duplicate content.
Thanks!
-
I am not sure the idea will take you out of panda or penguin but my ideas will defiantly going to kill the duplicate content on pages that you are facing at the moment
Add UGC:
It’s difficult for people for businesses to add UGC on their website as many are not comfortable with it but if you are then I would suggest to add UGC on their website that include game reviews, page comments and more...
The Game Talk:
Similar to UGC but here they will be restricted to talk about game cheats, tricks, and tactics only...
The more transparent you can be the more ideas will come in to your mind that will help you get away from duplicate content issue but again I am not sure if this is going to take you out of panda or penguin.
-
Wordpress is good or you can provide both the options for commenting. The disqus comment plugin for wordpress is great.
-
Hello,
Thank you for the response. In regards to the rel tags, we actually bought this website about a month before penguin, so the duplicate content was already there (and we were ranking very well). However, the point you raised about user comments is a good one, that would give us some more content.
In that case, is the wordpress comment system the way to go, or the Facebook system?
Thanks!
-
How valuable is the site traffic to you. If you monetize the site traffic well then you should definitely invest in creating unique content for the site. You could have avoided these issues if you had used the rel canonical tag to identify the source of the content. It also matters on how much of the content is duplicated . If it's only a small percentage then it should make that much of a difference.
Based on the info provided and the fact that you have already been hit with google's updates, you should invest in creating unique content. Along with content also create unique meta tags for the pages as well as encourage user interaction on the game pages with reviews /comments.
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
-
Is this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice. The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product. My duplicate content concern refers to the following, When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content) When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content). My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Hosted Wordpress Blog creating Duplicate Content
In my first report from SEOmoz, I see that there are a bunch of "duplicate content" errors that originate from our blog hosted on Wordpress. For example, it's showing that the following URLs all have duplicate content: http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/ys/
Technical SEO | | TomHu
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/16/vendome-prize-website/gallery-7701/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/sm/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/26/top-ten-tips-to-mastering-the-twitterverse/unknown/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/bv/ They all lead to the various images that have been used in various blog posts. But, I'm not sure why they are considered duplicate content because they have unique URLs and the title meta tag is unique for each one, too. But even so, I don't want these extraneous URLs cluttering up our search results, so, I'm removing all of the links that were automatically created when placing the images in the posts. But, once I do that, will these URLs eventually disappear, or continue to be there? Because our blog is hosted by Wordpress, I unfortunately can't add any of the SEO plugins I've read about, so, wondering how to fix this without special plugins. Thanks!
Tom0 -
Duplicate content problem from an index.php file
Hi One of my sites is flagging a duplicate content problem which is affecting the search rankings. The duplicate problem is caused by http://www.mydomain.com/index.php which has a page rank of 26 How can I sort the duplicate content problem, as the main page should just be http://www.mydomain.com which has a page rank of 42 and is the stronger page with stronger links etc Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate content
I have a site that is new but I managed to get it to page one. Now when I scan it on SEO Moz I see that I have duplicate content. Ex: www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index and www.mysite.com/ How do I fix this without jeopardizing my SERPS ranking? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Tags causing Duplicate page content?
I was looking through the 'Duplicate Page Content' and Too Many On-Page Link' errors and they all seem to be linked to the 'Tags' on my blog pages. Is this really a problem and if so how should I be using tags properly to get the best SEO rewards?
Technical SEO | | zapprabbit1 -
Omniture tracking code URLs creating duplicate content
My ecommerce company uses Omniture tracking codes for a variety of different tracking parameters, from promotional emails to third party comparison shopping engines. All of these tracking codes create URLs that look like www.domain.com/?s_cid=(tracking parameter), which are identical to the original page and these dynamic tracking pages are being indexed. The cached version is still the original page. For now, the duplicate versions do not appear to be affecting rankings, but as we ramp up with holiday sales, promotions, adding more CSEs, etc, there will be more and more tracking URLs that could potentially hurt us. What is the best solution for this problem? If we use robots.txt to block the ?s_cid versions, it may affect our listings on CSEs, as the bots will try to crawl the link to find product info/pricing but will be denied. Is this correct? Or, do CSEs generally use other methods for gathering and verifying product information? So far the most comprehensive solution I can think of would be to add a rel=canonical tag to every unique static URL on our site, which should solve the duplicate content issues, but we have thousands of pages and this would take an eternity (unless someone knows a good way to do this automagically, I’m not a programmer so maybe there’s a way that I don’t know). Any help/advice/suggestions will be appreciated. If you have any solutions, please explain why your solution would work to help me understand on a deeper level in case something like this comes up again in the future. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianCC0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0