Am I doing enough to rid duplicate content?
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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?
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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.
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