How do I Address Low Quality/Duplicate Content Issue for a Job portal?
-
Hi,
I want to optimize my job portal for maximum search traffic.
Problems
- Duplicate content- The portal takes jobs from other portals/blogs and posts on our site. Sometimes employers provide the same job posting to multiple portals and we are not allowed to change it resulting in duplicate content
- Empty Content Pages- We have a lot of pages which can be reached via filtering for multiple options. Like IT jobs in New York. If there are no IT jobs posted in New York, then it's a blank page with little or no content
- Repeated Content- When we have job postings, we have about the company information on each job listing page. If a company has 1000 jobs listed with us, that means 1000 pages have the exact same about the company wording
Solutions Implemented
- Rel=prev and next. We have implemented this for pagination. We also have self referencing canonical tags on each page. Even if they are filtered with additional parameters, our system strips of the parameters and shows the correct URL all the time for both rel=prev and next as well as self canonical tags
- For duplicate content- Due to the volume of the job listings that come each day, it's impossible to create unique content for each. We try to make the initial paragraph (at least 130 characters) unique. However, we use a template system for each jobs. So a similar pattern can be detected after even 10 or 15 jobs. Sometimes we also take the wordy job descriptions and convert them into bullet points. If bullet points already available, we take only a few bullet points and try to re-shuffle them at times
Can anyone provide me additional pointers to improve my site in terms of on-page SEO/technical SEO?
Any help would be much appreciated.
We are also thinking of no-indexing or deleting old jobs once they cross X number of days. Do you think this would be a smart strategy? Should I No-index empty listing pages as well?
Thank you.
-
Unique Listing Copy
I would try to get that unique content to the top of the source order - it doesn't necessarily have to appear at the top of the page - it could be in a sidebar for instance, but it should be first in the source so that Googlebot gobbles it up before it reaches duplicate stuff or secondary nav / footer links etc.
No Results pages
Yes, you could certainly noindex your no-results pages with a robots meta tag - that would be a good idea.
Loading duplicate content with ajax
In terms of Google and ajax content, yes Googlebot can and does follow links it finds in javascript.
All I can tell you here is my own experience
On my product detail template, I have loaded up category descriptions with ajax that appear canonically (if that's the right way of putting it) on my listing pages. In the SERPs, the cat description content is indexed for the pages I want it to be indexed for (the listings in this case), and not for the product detail pages where I'm loading with ajax. And these product detail pages still perform well and get good organic landing traffic.
On the product detail page where I'm loading with ajax, I have the copy in an accordion, and it's loaded with an ajax request on document ready. It might be considered slightly more cochre to do this in response to a user action though - such as clicking on the accordion in my case. The theory being that you're making your site responsive to a user's needs, rather than loading up half the content one way and the other half another way, if you get what I mean.
Sometimes of course you just cannot avoid certain amounts of content duplication within your site.
-
Luke,
Thank you for your detailed reply.
I forgot to mention that for each of our important filter pages (like IT jobs in New York) we do have a unique paragraph text which is human readable and at the same time SEO optimized (They are around 200 words long and is not there for all filter pages due to the volume of such pages.) This unique block of text rests at the bottom of the page, just above the footer, after all the latest 20 job listings are shown.
"Filtering & Blank Results Pages Could this not be done with javascript / ajax, so that Google never finds an empty listing?"
I am afraid this cannot be done due to the structure of our system. No-Indexing them would be much more easier. Wouldn't it do?
"You could load this content from an ajax template, either as the page loads, or in response to a user action (eg. click on a button 'show company details')."
Sounds like a good idea. Are you sure Google will not consider this as cloaking and that Google cannot read Ajax content?
"Try not to load up the duplicate description by default."- Do you mean we should implement Ajax again for this part?
"You will want to, where possible, specify a view-all page for Google"- not sure if this will be possible from our side due to engineering limitations. I thought rel=next and prev would solve the issue. However, I still see intermediate pages indexed.
-
Hi, I've tried to address your issues point by point according to your post...
Duplicate Job Posting Content
You can try to offset this by having a couple hundred words of unique copy per listing page url exposed to Google. So, if your page lists all jobs in the catering industry in New Jersey for instance, write some copy on the topic, and try to make it readable and useful to the user as well. Add microdata to the template using schema.org, so that Google can understand what's there at the data level - there will likely be entities available there to describe your content in terms of location, the companies that are hiring, etc.
I'm inclined to say don't bother with reshuffling duplicate content and adding bullet points to it - Google is smart enough to recognise that this copy is the same, and will not give you any points - perhaps the opposite - for trying to disguise this.
Filtering & Blank Results Pages
Could this not be done with javascript / ajax, so that Google never finds an empty listing?
'About the Company' Duplicate Content
You could load this content from an ajax template, either as the page loads, or in response to a user action (eg. click on a button 'show company details'). I have solved this exact problem like this in the past - loading a tour category description that appears on a great many tour detail pages.
Perhaps you can do as I'm suggesting above for the job description duplication - where possible, and as long as it's done in a way that does not come across as cloaking. It's good that you have a unique paragaph above the duplicate description.Try not to load up the duplicate description by default. I'm not sure on your source order or site / template structure so difficult to get too detailed here and I don't want to risk suggesting something that could be interpreted as a violation of Google's guidelines.
Pagination
You will want to, where possible, specify a view-all page for Google - this is suggested by them as a best practice, and in my experience, Googlebot loves to find chunky listing content, PROVIDED that it loads quickly enough not to hamper the user experience.
You can make sure of this by lazyloading images and other media. Be sure to specify the correct image src attributes (not spacer.gif for instance) inside of noscript tags to make sure that image content is still indexed.
You could also load up the markup for all items in the listing, and then use javascript to chunk the content into 'pages', or load it asynchronously where javascript is available. If no javascript, then load all content. By using javascript pagination, you basically avert the need for a separate view all page, meaning only have one template to maintain and optimise.
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
-
Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us. Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Chris6610 -
Subdomain Severe Duplicate Content Issue
Hi A subdomain for our admin site has been indexed and it has caused over 2000 instances of duplicate content. To fix this issue, is a 301 redirect or canoncial tag the best option? http://www.example.com/services http://admin.example.com/services Really appreciate your advice J
Technical SEO | | Metricly-Marketing0 -
Duplicate content /index.php/ issues
I'm having some duplicate content issues with Google. I've already got my .htaccess file working just fine as far as I can tell. Rewriting works great, and by using the site you'd never end up on a page with /index.php. However I do notice that on ANY page of the site you could add /index.php and get the same page i.e.: www.mysite.com/category/article and www.mysite.com/index.php/category/article Would both return the same page. How can I 301 or something similar all /index.php pages to the non index.php version? I have no desire for any page on my site to have index.php in it, there is no use to it. Having quite the hard time figuring this out. Again this is basically just for the robots, the URL's the users see are perfect, never had an issue with that. Just SEOMOZ reporting duplicate content and I've verified that to be true.
Technical SEO | | b18turboef1 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi everyone, I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have. www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116 Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it? At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
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 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0