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
-
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Noindexing Duplicate (non-unique) Content
When "noindex" is added to a page, does this ensure Google does not count page as part of their analysis of unique vs duplicate content ratio on a website? Example: I have a real estate business and I have noindex on MLS pages. However, is there a chance that even though Google does not index these pages, Google will still see those pages and think "ah, these are duplicate MLS pages, we are going to let those pages drag down value of entire site and lower ranking of even the unique pages". I like to just use "noindex, follow" on those MLS pages, but would it be safer to add pages to robots.txt as well and that should - in theory - increase likelihood Google will not see such MLS pages as duplicate content on my website? On another note: I had these MLS pages indexed and 3-4 weeks ago added "noindex, follow". However, still all indexed and no signs Google is noindexing yet.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
How do I geo-target continents & avoid duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a website which will have content tailored for a few locations: USA: www.site.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
Europe EN: www.site.com/eu
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr-ca Link hreflang and the GWT option are designed for countries. I expect a fair amount of duplicate content; the only differences will be in product selection and prices. What are my options to tell Google that it should serve www.site.com/eu in Europe instead of www.site.com? We are not targeting a particular country on that continent. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Duplicate content from development website
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched. I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690