Complex duplicate content question
-
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site.
What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this.
Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option.
As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of:
http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge
Would changing this have any SEO benefit?
Thanks
Martin
-
I went through both sites and noticed that you don't have canonicals on any of your pages. Also don't see any XML sitemaps.
If you can only show the businesses that are in that particular area, and remove the ones that are not I would probably go for that, unless you are doing Local Search as well.
I would be curious to see the example of canonical issue you mentioned.
Are these Joomla sites? I'm just asking because there are no description tags on anything except the home page.
-
Maybe this article on the Matt Cutts blog can help you : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/
-
I thought the same but a couple of weeks ago when I was reviewing the impact of implementing rel canonical (which was done several months earlier) I was find quite a number of situations whether Google was not taking notice of the rel canonical guidance and was using the wrong site within its search results (having difficulty finding a specific example at the moment though). The conclusion I came to was Google simply views rel canonical as a suggestion rather than a rule.
-
I'd suggest that rel canonical is the perfect way to handle this. What seems to be the problem with this approach that makes you want to chance it?
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
-
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
Duplicate content when working with makes and models?
Okay, so I am running a store on Shopify at the address https://www.rhinox-group.com. This store is reasonably new, so being updated constantly! The thing that is really annoying me at the moment though, is I am getting errors in the form of duplicate content. This seems to be because we work using the machine make and model, which is obviously imperative, but then we have various products for each machine make and model. Have we got any suggestions on how I can cut down on these errors, as the last thing I want is being penalised by Google for this! Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | josh.sprakes1 -
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hello, After crawling our site Moz is detecting high priority duplicate page content for our product and article listing pages, For example http://store.bmiresearch.com/bangladesh/power and http://store.bmiresearch.com/newzealand/power are being listed as duplicate pages although they have seperate URLs, page titles and H1 tags. They have the same product listed but I would have thought the differentiation in other areas would be sufficient for these to not be deemed as duplicate pages. Is it likely this issue will be impacting on our search rankings? If so are there any recommendations as to how this issue can be overcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0
