Duplicate Content only an Issue on a Huge Scale?
-
To what extent is duplicate content an issue? We have a support forum with some duplicate content because users ask the same questions. The Moz reports we receive highlights our duplicate content and page title for our support forum as a "big" issue.
I'm unsure to what extent it harms our SEO, and making the support section non-crawable would impair our level of support. It would be nice to know for sure if we should be concerned about this, and if yes, how can we do it differently?
Thanks, I appreciate you help.
-Allan
-
Thanks a million guys, very helpful information.
All the best,
Allan
-
Hi Allan,
This is a typical issue with most of the forums out there and there is nothing that you should be worried about and leave it to the search engines to handle it. Moreover, the duplicate content itself cannot harm you or fetch you a penalty from a search engine like Google. Its the intent behind that causes the actual harm and potentially more dangerous.
Having that said, it does not mean you should engage in content duplication and think you are safe. You should stay away from any or all the deliberate or intentional content duplication with an intent to manipulate rankings. Content duplication when it comes to forums is very common thing and search engines are sensible enough in this regard.
Here is what Google has to say in this regard:
"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."
For more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
Hope that helps.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
I'm not certain that this kind of duplicate content harms your SEO, but I can tell you what my company did to mitigate this kind of duplicate questions.
We merged threads When questions are exactly the same, we just merge them into one thread. There's no point in having multiple threads when the answer is going to be the same, and having multiple answers in one thread is much more helpful to whoever needs this information in the future
We pre-empted the question with a support or FAQ page
This ended up being a huge part of our help page strategy. When we noticed that people were asking the same question several times, we we would create a new support page with in-depth answers to solve that problem, and suggest that users read this related page before posting their questionWe got rid of the forum... Right now, we don't have a public help forum (though this is something we'll likely open up again in the future, when we have more eyes to dedicate to monitoring the forum!), so what we ended up with is a bunch of in-depth help articles, as well as close monitoring of which popular search strings are not turning up good results, and which questions are popping up very frequently in our support queue.
I hope someone else can come along and answer the duplicate content part of your question, because I would love to know as well!
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
-
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Product Attribute pages and Duplicate content
Hiya I have two queries is about a jewellery shop running on wordpress and woocommerce. 1. I am a little indecisive on how to index the product categories without creating duplicate pages which will get me into trouble. For example: All earrings are listed on the category page: chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ We also have product attribute pages which lists all the subcategories for the earrings: chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/creoles/
On-Page Optimization | | bongoheads
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/drop/
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/studs/ I have the category URL and the product attribute URLs set to be indexed on my sitemaps. Will this get me into trouble creating duplicate content with the main category page? Should I only have the main category indexed and "no-index, follow" all the product attribute pages? 2. I am also thinking about incorporating these product attribute URLS into my menu so when people hover over earrings they get shown the types of earrings they can buy. However, I have the woocommerce faceted navigation working on the category pages. So if someone is visiting the page chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ The user can click on the left hand side, and select "drops". The URL they will get though is one which is not indexed: http://www.chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/?filter_earrings=123 Can I link to those product attribute pages without the risk of getting accused of creating duplicate content? Thank you for your help. Carolina0 -
Boat broker - issues with duplicate content and indexing search results
Hello, I have read a lot about optimising product pages and not indexing search results or category pages as ideally a person should be directed straight to a product page. I am interested in how best to approach a site that is listing second hand products for sale - essentially a marketplace of second hand goods (in my case, www.boatshed.com - international boat brokers). For example, we currently have 5 Colvic Sailer 26 boats for sale across the world - that is 5 boats of the same make and model but differing years, locations, sellers and prices. My concern is with search results and 'category' pages. Unlike typical e-commerce sites, when someone searches for a 'Colvic sailer 26 for sale' I want them to go to a search results style page as it is more useful for them to see a list of boats than one random one that Google decides is most important (or possibly one it can match by location). Currently we have 3 different URL types to show search results style pages (i.e. paginated lists of boats that include name, image and short description):
On-Page Optimization | | pbscreative
manufacturer URL's e.g. http://www.boatshed.com/colvic-manufacturer-145.html
category URL's e.g. barges http://www.boatshed.com/barges-category-55.html
and normal search results e.g. dosearch.php?form_boattype_textbox=&.... I have noindexed the search results pages but our category and manufacturer URLs show up in search results and ultimately these are pages I want people to land on. I am however getting duplicate content warnings in Moz. Most boats are in several categories and all will come up on 1 manufacturer and one manufacturer and model page. Both sets of URL's are in my opinion needed; lots of users search for exact makes / models and lots of users just search for the type of boat e.g. 'barge for sale' so both sets of landing pages are useful. Any suggestions or thoughts greatly appreciated Thanks Ben0 -
Solve duplicate content issues by using robots.txt
Hi, I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok? Thank for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
What Should I Do With Low Quality Content?
As my site has definitely got hit by Panda, I am in the process of cleaning my website of low quality content. Needless to say, shitty articles are completed being removed but I think lots of this content is now of low quality because it is obsolete and dated. So what should I do with this content? Should I rewrite those articles as completely new posts and link from the old posts to the new ones? Or should I delete the old posts and do a 301 redirect to the new post? Or should I rewrite the content of these articles in place so I can keep the old URL and backlinks? One thing is that I've got a lot more followers than I used to so publishing a new post gets a lot more views, like and shares and whatnot from social networks.
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault741 -
Duplicate content "/"
Hi all, Ran my website through the SEOMOZ campaigns and the crawl diagnostics give me a duplicate error for these urls http://www.mysite.com/cat1/article http://www.mysite.com/cat1/article/ so the url with the "/" is a duplicate of the one without the "/" Can someone point me out to a solution to solve this ? regards, Frederik
On-Page Optimization | | frdrik1230 -
Why are my tags causing duplicate error?
Hi, When I run an SEO moz crawl it is picking up duplicate errors from my tags. Currently I have these set as domain url/tag/name of the tag. Is this incorrect? Is there anything I can do to stop this being picked up as duplicate pages? Thanks, Eliz
On-Page Optimization | | econley0 -
Duplicate Content
We offer Wellness programs for dogs and cats. A lot of the information is the same except for specifics that relate to young vs. senior pets. I have these different pages: Senior Wellness Kitten Wellness Puppy Wellness Adult Wellness Can each page have approx. 75% of the same text? Or should I rewrite each page so the information (though the same) appears unique.
On-Page Optimization | | PMC-3120870