Duplicate Content, Canonicalization may not work in our scenario.
-
I'm new to SEO (so please excuse the lack of terminology), and will be taking over our companies inbound marketing completely, I previously just did data analysis and managed our PPC campaigns within Google and Bing/Yahoo, now I get all three, Yipee! But I digress.
Before I get started here, I did read: http://moz.com/community/q/new-client-wants-to-keep-duplicate-content-targeting-different-cities?sort=most_helpful and I found both the answers there to be helpful, but indirect for my scenario.
I'm conducting our companies first real SEO audit (thanks MOZ for the guide there), and duplicate content is going to be our number one problem to tackle. Our companies website was designed back in 2009, with the file structure /city-name/product-name. The problem with this is, we are open in over 50 cities now (and headed to 100 fast), and we are starting to amass duplicate content. Five products (and expanding), times the locations... you get it.
My Question(s):
How should I deal with this? The pages are almost identical, except listing the different information for each product depending upon it's location. However, for one of our products, Moz's own tools (PRO) did not find all the duplicate content, but did find some (I'm assuming it's because the pages have different course options and the address for the course is different, boils down to a different address on the very bottom of the body and different course options on the right sidebar). The other four products duplicate content were found and marked extensively.
If I choose to use Canonicalization to link all the pages to one main page, I believe that would pass all the link juice to that one page, but we would no longer show in a Google search for the other cities, ex: washington DC example product name. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
**Should I worry about the product who's duplicate content only was marked four times out of fifty cities? **I feel as if this question answers itself, but I still would like to have someone who knows more than me shed some light on this issue.
The other four products are not going to be an issue as they are only offered online, but still follow the same file structure with /online in place of /city-name. These will be Canonicalized together under the /online location.
One last thing I will mention here, having the city name in the url gives us a nice advantage (I think) when people are searching for products in cities we offer our product. (correct me again) If this is not the case, I believe I could talk our team into restructuring the files (if you think that's our best option).
Some things you need to know about our site:
We use a cookie for the location. Once you land on a page that has a location tied to it, the cookie is updated and saved. If the location does not exist, then you are redirected to a page to chose a location. I'm pretty sure this can cause some SEO issues too, but once again not sure.
I know this is a wall of text, but I cannot tell you enough how appreciative I am in advance for your informative answers.
Thanks a million,
Trenton
-
Well, I'm super impatient so I spent the last two days trying to figure this one out:
Best Solution:
Canonicalize the four products not contingent on a city, and leave the rest alone. There's no way to canonicalize a page forward(is that a term? should be.) and still have that page show up in Search Engines. So I cannot standardize all the cities into one page, without losing the ability to search for those individual pages (which is worth more to us than having our link juice in 1 spot).
Thanks to everyone who took a look and tried to help.
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 to deal with auto generated pages on our site that are considered thin content
Hi there, Wondering how to deal w/ about 300+ pages on our site that are autogenerated & considered thin content. Here is an example of those pages: https://app.cobalt.io/ninp0 The pages are auto generated when a new security researcher joins our team & then filled by each researcher with specifics about their personal experience. Additionally, there is a fair amount of dynamic content on these pages that updates with certain activities. These pages are also getting marked as not having a canonical tag on them, however, they are technically different pages just w/ very similar elements. I'm not sure I would want to put a canonical tag on them as some of them have a decent page authority & I think could be contributing to our overall SEO health. Any ideas on how I should deal w/ this group of similar but not identical pages?
Moz Pro | | ChrissyOck0 -
Link check via open site explorer not working?
Not sure why this is happening but when i run our site though open site explorer it is only coming back with 1 link yet we have at least 10 - 20? our site is https://www.fastlabels.co.uk and i tried without the https:// so www.fastlabels.co.uk Any help would be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | BobAnderson0 -
Duplicate content in SEOMOZ report
Hi guys, The SEOMOZ report shows there is duplicate content on my Magento ecommerce: footdistrict.com Example: http://footdistrict.com/nike-air-royalty-386169602.html?___store=footdistrict_en Duplicate content shown on the report: http://footdistrict.com/marcas/puma.html?___store=footdistrict_en
Moz Pro | | footd
http://footdistrict.com/new-balance-m400rk.html?___store=footdistrict_en
http://footdistrict.com/new-balance-gm500mbn.html?___store=footdistrict_en
http://footdistrict.com/new-balance-m400nnb.html?___store=footdistrict_en My guess is that this is due to the fixed footer that we have set where modal windows pop up with delivery info and so on. As such, all the content within it is repeated through all the pages What do you recommend me to remove this duplicate content? I have read about duplicate content issues but they don't usually deal with div tag duplicate issues, modal windows and so on. Thanks Regards0 -
Duplicate page title
Hello my page has this Although with seomoz crawl it says that this pages has duplicate titles. If my blog has 25 pages, i have according seomoz 25 duplicate titles. Can someone tell me if this is correct or if the seomoz crawl cannot recognize rel="next" or if there is another better way to tell google when there a pages generated from the blog that as the same title Should i ignore these seomoz errors thank you,
Moz Pro | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How can I correct this massive duplicate content problem?
I just updated a clients website which resulted in about 6000 duplicate page content errors. The way I set up my clients new website is I created a sub folder calles blog and installed wordpress on that folder. So when you go to suncoastlaw.com your taken to an html website, but if you click on the blog link in the nav, your taken to the to blog subfolder. The problem I'm having is that the url's seem to be repeating them selves. So for example, if you type in in http://suncoastlaw.com/blog/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/ that somehow is a legitimate url and is being considered duplicate content of of http://suncoastlaw.com/aboutus.htm/. This repeating url only seems to be a problem when the blog/ is in the url. Any ideas as to how I can fix this?
Moz Pro | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Our Duplicate Content Crawled by SEOMoz Roger, but Not in Google Webmaster Tools
Hi Guys, We're new here and I couldn't find the answer to my question. Here it goes: We had SEOMoz's Roger Crawl all of our pages and he came up with quite a few erros (Duplicate Content, Duplicate Page Titles, Long URL's). Per our CTO and using our Google Webmaster Tools, we informed Google not to index those Duplicate Content Pages. For our Long URL Errors, they are redirected to SEF URL's. What we would like to know is if Roger is able to know that we have instructed Google to not index these pages. My concern is Should we still be concerned if Roger is still crawling those pages and the errors are not showing up in our Webmaster Tools Is there a way we can let Roger know so they don't come up as errors in our SEOMoz Tools? Thanks so much, e
Moz Pro | | RichSteel0 -
90% of our sites that are designed are in wordpress and the report brings up "duplicate" content errors. I presume this is down to a conical error?
We are looking at getting the Agency version of SEOMoz and are based in the UK Could you please tell me what would be the best way to correct this issue as this appears to be a problem with all our clients websites. an example would be www.fsgenergy.co.uk Would you also be able to suggest the best SEO plugin to use with SEOMOz ? Many thanks Paul
Moz Pro | | KloodLtd1 -
Will canonical tag get rid of duplicate page title errors?
I have a directory on my website, paginated in groups of 10. On page 2 of the results, the title tag is the same as the first page, as it is on the 3rd page and so on. This is giving me duplicate page title errors. If i use rel=canonical tags on the subsequent pages and href the first page of my results, will my duplicate page title warnings go away? thanks.
Moz Pro | | fourthdimensioninc0