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
-
We have 2 versions of URLs. we have the mobile and the desktop. is that a duplicate content?
Hi, Our website has two version of URLs. dektop: www.myexample.com and mobile www.myexample.com/m If you go to our site from a mobile device you will land on our mobile URL, if you go to our site from desktop computer you will land on a regular URL. Both urls have the same content. Is that considered duplicate? If yes, then what can I do to fix it? Also, both URLs are indexed by google. We have two separate XML sitemaps- one for desktop and one for mobile. Is that a good SEO practice?
Technical SEO | | Armen-SEO0 -
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics has returned several issues that I'm unsure how to fix. I'm guessing it's a canonical link issue but not entirely sure... Duplicate Page Content/Titles On a website (http://www.smselectronics.co.uk/market-sectors) with 6 market sectors but each pull the same 3 pages as child pages - certifications, equipment & case studies. On each products section where the page only shows X amount of items but there are several pages to fit all the products this creates multiple pages. There is also a similar pagination problem with the Blogs (auto generated date titles & user created SEO titles) & News listings. Blog Tags also seem to generate duplicate pages with the same content/titles as the parent page. Are these particularly important for SEO or is it more important to remove the duplication by deleting them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | BBDCreative0 -
Duplicate Content
SEOmoz is reporting duplicate content for 2000 of my pages. For example, these are reported as duplicate content: http://curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158
Technical SEO | | jplill
http://curatorseye.com/Name=âHolster-Atlasâ---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 The actual link on the site is http://www.curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 Any insight on how to fix this? I'm not sure where the second version of the URL is coming from. Thanks,
Janet0 -
"Daily Special" = Duplicate Content?
I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient: We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure: www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html. We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended: www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html ** Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RScime250 -
How do I fix this type of duplicate page content problem?
Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content URLs Internal Links External Links Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 26 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 20 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ | 1,630 | 613 | 43 | 110 | As you can see there are three duplicate pages; http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ What would be the best and most efficient way to fix this problem and also how to prevent this from happening? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | brianhughes0 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hi Everyone, I ran into a problem I didn't know I had (Thanks to the seomoz tool) regarding duplicate content. my site is oxford ms homes.net and when I built the site, the web developer used php to build it. After he was done I saw that the URL's looking like this "/blake_listings.php?page=0" and I wanted them like this "/blakes-listings" He changed them with no problem and he did the same with all 300 pages or so that I have on the site. I just found using the crawl diagnostics tool that I have like 3,000 duplicate content issues. Is there an easy fix to this at all or does he have to go in and 301 Redirect EVERY SINGLE URL? Thanks for any help you can give.
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
Duplicate content
Greetings! I have inherited a problem that I am not sure how to fix. The website I am working on had a 302 redirect from its original home url (with all the link juice) to a newly designed page (with no real link juice). When the 302 redirect was removed, a duplicate content problem remained, since the new page had already been indexed by google. What is the best way to handle duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shedontdiet0