Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
-
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag.
Manually changing the descriptions is not an option.
Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"?
Any other ideas?
Thanks!
-
Until your site is the KickAss site in your SERPs just add something catchy to the title tag like "Schedule a Tour!" ....... or....... "Free Beer"........ or..... "See it Today!"
-
Right... after your site is established this might not be a problem. I know that your site is relatively new and that it will become the KickAss site in your SERPs.
Don't do obsessive SEO if you can do efficient SEO.
-
Thank you! You've got some great points!
I like the idea of having both the address and the mls in the title and then reversing them for the mls.
For the photos I have the address as my alt tag. I could certainly add the mls too.
-
Oooh. I like this thought. Right now for most of these searches we are on the front page but not #1. However, this is a brand new site and I haven't built any links to it. So, perhaps, once I've got links and my site is viewed as the "kickass site in the niche" then the duplication will only be a problem for the other realtors?
-
The property address is most important and would definitely use that in the title. You'll find the MLS # to be almost as important. Why not include both in the title? Then reverse the order for H1?
I wouldn't be too concerned about duplicate content. I'm not sure about your area but most areas have an MLS that is syndicating the listings to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites which all use the same description.
In working with real estate sites I also found that "house for sale on {street name}" or "home for sale on {street name}" tended to drive traffic to the the individual property pages.
What are you doing with the property photos? I'd optimize those as well for the property address and MLS number.
-
Go out into the SERPs. See what's happening.
If you have the kickass site in the niche, your page for this home might rank well.
Other guy's problem, not yours.
-
LOL...this is why I was asking the question. Is there anything I can do to help other than manually changing the descriptions?
-
That's even worse.
-
Whoah! You definitely don't want that...
-
Oh...I may have worded my question incorrectly! The content is not duplicated across my site. Rather, the home description is the exact same content as on several other realtors' sites.
-
You can always just have the content indexable on one page and add it to an image for all the other pages.
-
I'd love to discuss this...in fact, I'm going to start a new discussion on it!
-
It's not that, it's just that it's potentially damaging (sorry, I'm quoting that Market Motive seminar again... been doing that a lot lately lol) to have an H1 and title tag that match.
-
Interesting idea. We do get hits because of the content in the description though. for example, we get a lot of hits for "In law suite".
-
Good idea, or have it in an iframe!
-
Is it possible for you to put that listing content in an image? This would allow you to continue using indentical content on all pages. However, the content in the image would not be searchable. If you are just using this content for the user experience, that's fine. If you want it indexed to add quality to the page, you will instead want to make each listing unique.
-
I guess it makes sense to have a different h1. What do you think would be most effective? I think the title should be the house address as this is most likely to be searched. Perhaps the H1 could be "MLS #123456"?
-
I don't know the answer to the actual question but I do know that you should never have the title and h1 match... or have dupe meta descriptions but you already know that
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
-
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
How to avoid duplicate content with e-commerce and multiple stores?
We are currently developing an e-commerce platform that will feed multiple stores. Each store will have its own domain and URL, but all stores will offer products that come from the same centralized database. That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agence_Bunji0 -
Duplicate content issue - online retail site.
Hello Mozzers, just looked at a website and just about every product page (there are hundreds - yikes!) is duplicated like this at end of each url (see below). Surely this is a serious case of duplicate content? Any idea why a web developer would do this? Thanks in advance! Luke prod=company-081
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
prod=company-081&cat=20 -
Dealing with close content - duplicate issue for closed products
Hello I'm dealing with some issues. Moz analyses is telling me that I have duplicate on some of my products pages. My issue is that: Concern very similar products IT products are from the same range Just the name and pdf are different Do you think I should use canonical url ? Or it will be better to rewrite about 80 descriptions (but description will be almost the same) ? Best regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Is SEOmoz.org creating duplicate content with their CDN subdomain?
Example URL: http://cdn.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions Canonical is a RELATIVE link, should be an absolute link pointing to main domain: http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions <link href='[/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions](view-source:http://cdn.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions)' rel='<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>' /> 13,400 pages indexed in Google under cdn subdomain go to google > site:http://cdn.seomoz.org https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.seomoz.org%2F&oq=site:http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.seomoz.org%2F&gs_l=hp.2...986.6227.0.6258.28.14.0.0.0.5.344.3526.2-10j2.12.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.Uprw7ko7jnU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=97577626a0fb6a97&biw=1920&bih=936
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw1 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0