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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.
Hi guys, We're planning on starting a Saas based service where we'll be selling different skins. Let's say WordPress themes, though it's not about that. Say we have an url called site.com/ and we would like to direct all seo juice to the mother landing page /best-wp-themes/ but then have that juice flow towards our additional pages: /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozify
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes
/best-wp-themes/?id=Fiximoz /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozicom Challenges: 1. our content would be formatted like this:
a. Same content - features b. Same content - price c. Different content - each theme will have its own set of features / design specs. d. Same content - testimonials. How would be go about not being penalised by SE's for the duplicate content, but still have the /?id=whatever pages be indexed with proper content? 2. How do we go about making sure SEO juice flows to the /?id pages too?Basically it's the same thing with different skins. Thanks for the help!0 -
Country Code Top Level Domains & Duplicate Content
Hi looking to launch in a new market, currently we have a .com.au domain which is geo-targeted to Australia. We want to launch in New Zealand which is ends with .co.nz If i duplicate the Australian based site completely on the new .co.nz domain name, would i face duplicate content issues from a SEO standpoint?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Even though it's on a completely separate country code. Or is it still advised tosetup hreflang tag across both of the domains? Cheers.0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains
Hi All, The structure of the main website goes by http://abc.com/state/city/publication - We have a partnership with public libraries to give local users access to the publication content for free. We have over 100 subdomains (each for an specific library) that have duplicate content issues with the root domain, Most subdomains have very high page authority (the main public library and other local .gov websites have links to this subdomains).Currently this subdomains are not index due to the robots text file excluding bots from crawling. I am in the process of setting canonical tags on each subdomain and open the robots text file. Should I set the canonical tag on each subdomain (homepage) to the root domain version or to the specific city within the root domain? Example 1:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NewspaperArchive
Option 1: http://covina.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/california/covina/
Option 2: http://covina.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ Example 2:
Option 1: http://galveston.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/texas/galveston/
Option 2: http://galveston.abc.com = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ Example 3:
Option 1: http://hutchnews.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/us/kansas/hutchinson/
Option 2: http://hutchnews.abc.com/ = Canonical Tag = http://abc.com/ I believe it makes more sense to set the canonical tag to the corresponding city (option 1), but wondering if setting the canonical tag to the root domain will pass "some link juice" to the root domain and it will be more beneficial. Thanks!0 -
Coupon Website Has Tons of Duplicate Content, How do I fix it?
Ok, so I just got done running my campaign on SEOMOZ for a client of mine who owns a Coupon Magazine company. They upload thousands of ads into their website which gives similar looking duplicate content ... like http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/100 and
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keith-Eneix
http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/101. There's about 3200 duplicates right now on the website like this. The client wants the coupon pages to be indexed and followed by search engines so how would I fix the duplicate content but still maintain search-ability of these coupon landing pages?0 -
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 -
Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crvw0