Am I doing enough to rid duplicate content?
-
I'm in the middle of a massive cleanup effort of old duplicate content on my site, but trying to make sure I'm doing enough.
My main concern now is a large group of landing pages. For example:
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/executive-suites/dallas
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/medical-space/dallas
And these are just the tip of the iceberg. For now, I've put canonical tags on each sub-page to direct to the main market page (the second two both point to the first, http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas for example). However this situation is in many other cities as well, and each has a main page like the first one above. For instance:
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/atlanta
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston
Obviously the previous SEO was pretty heavy-handed with all of these, but my question for now is should I even bother with canonical tags for all of the sub-pages to the main pages (medical-space or executive-suites to office-space), or is the presence of all these pages problematic in itself? In other words, should http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago and http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston and all the others have canonical tags pointing to just one page, or should a lot of these simply be deleted?
I'm continually finding more and more sub-pages that have used the same template, so I'm just not sure the best way to handle all of them. Looking back historically in Analytics, it appears many of these did drive significant organic traffic in the past, so I'm going to have a tough time justifying deleting a lot of them.
Any advice?
-
Heather,
I'm confused as to what the duplicate content is. The three Dallas pages you mentioned have different content. Sure there's a decent amount that's the same from the site-wide content (nav menus, etc.), but each has different text and information about different locations that are available. How is it duplicate?
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Heather,
First things: 1. Are they still driving traffic? 2. Rel=canonicals are supposed to be used on identical pages or on a page whose content is a subset of the canonical version.
Those pages are very thin content and I certainly wouldn't leave them as they are. If they're still driving content, I'd keep them, but for fear of panda, I'd 302 them to the main pages while I work steadily on putting real content on them and then remove the redirects as the content goes on.
If they're not still driving traffic, it seems to me that it wouldn't be very hard to justifying their removal (or 301 redirection to their main pages). Panda is a tough penalty and you don't want to get caught in 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 to unrank your content by following expert advice [rant]
Hi, As you can probably see from the title, a massive rant is coming up. I must admit I no longer understand SEO and I just wanted to see if you have any ideas what might be wrong. So, I read this blog post on MOZ https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor - where the chap is improving ranking of content that is already ranking reasonably well. I've got two bits of news for you. The good news is - yes, you can change your articles' ranking in an afternoon. Bad news - your articles drop out of Top 100. I'll give you a bit more details hoping you can spot what's wrong. Disclaimer - I'm not calling out BS, I'm sure the blogger is a genuine person and he's probably has had success implementing this. The site is in a narrow but popular ecommerce niche where the Top 20 results are taken by various retailers who have simply copy/pasted product descriptions from the manufacturer's websites. The link profile strength is varied and I'm not making this up. The Top 20 sites range from DA:4 to DA:56. When I saw this I said to myself, it should be fairly easy to rank because surely the backlinks ranking factor weight is not as heavy in this niche as it is in other niches. My site is DA:18 which is much better than DA:4. So, even if I make my pages tiny tiny bit better than this DA:4 site, I should outrank it, right? Well, I managed to outrank it with really crap content. So, I got to rank two high-traffic keywords in #8 or #9 with very little effort. And I wish I stayed there because what followed just completely ruined my rankings. I won't repeat what was written in the blog. If you're interested, go and read it, but I used it as a blueprint and bingo, indeed Google changed my ranking in just a couple of hours. Wait, I lost more than 90 positions!!!! I'm now outside Top100. Now even irrelevant sites in Chinese and Russian are in front of me. They don't even sell the products. No, they're even in different niches altogether but they still outrank me. I now know exactly what Alice in Wonderland felt like. I want out please!!!!
Algorithm Updates | | GiantsCauseway0 -
Google creating it own content
I am based in Australia but a US founded search on 'sciatica' shows an awesome answer on the RHS of the SERP https://www.google.com/search?q=sciatica&oq=sciatica&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The download on sciatica is a pdf created by google. Firstly is this common in the US? secondly any inputs on where this is heading for rollout would be appreciated. Is google now creating its own content to publish?
Algorithm Updates | | ClaytonJ0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
What to do with old, outdated and light content on a blog?
So there's a blog I recently took over - that over the past 2 years has great content. However, with their 800+ published posts. I'd say that 250-300 posts are light in content, that's nothing more than a small paragraph with no real specificity on what its about - more like general updates. Now what would best practice be; optimizing all of the posts or deleting the posts and 301'ing the URL to another post/the root?
Algorithm Updates | | simplycary0 -
Will Parked Domain hurt My SEO as Duplicate Content?
Hello, I have one website (Migration Lawyers) and I have an extra 8 domains Parked so they are basically cloning the content of the site. so if the main site is: migrationlawyers.co.za and I have an addon domain migration-lawyers.com is that good or bad? is there a proper way to redirect the sites, will redirecting (301) subdomains be more effective? Thanks for your Input 🙂 0i8VXqr.png
Algorithm Updates | | thealika0 -
Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to borrow product descriptions?
Hello, I work for an online retailer that has the opportunity to add a lot of SKUs to our site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site (with their permission). There are a lot of positives for us to do this, but one big question we have is what the borrowed content will do to our search rankings (we normally write our own original content in house for a couple thousand SKUs). Organic search traffic brings in a significant chunk of our business and we definitely don't want to do something that would jeopardize our rankings. Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to use the borrowed product descriptions? Is there a rule of thumb for what proportion of the site should be original content vs. duplicate content without running into issues with our search rankings? Thank you for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
How Can I Prevent Duplicate Page Title Errors?
I am working on a website that has two different sections, one for consumers and one for business. However, the products and the product pages are essentially the same but, of course, the pricing and quantities may be different. We just have different paths based on the kind of customer. And, we get feeds from manufacturers for the content so it's difficult to change it. We want Google to index both sections of the site but we don't want to get hammered for duplicate page titles and content. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | JillCS0 -
What is considered duplicate content in an ecommerce website that offers the same product for retail and wholesale purchasing?
I have an ecommerce website that offers retail and wholesale products which are identical, of course with the exception of pricing. My concern is duplicate content. If the same product is offered under both the retail and wholesale category, and described identically, with the exception of price, metadata and a few words, is that considered duplicate content and would both pages be disregarded by the robots? Is it best to avoid the same description for that one product under the two separate categories? Thanks for all your help!
Algorithm Updates | | flaca0
