Is this Duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
This is now popping up in Moz after using this for over 6 months.
It is saying this is now duplicate site content.What do we think? Is this a bad strategy, it works well on the SERPS but could be damaging the root domain page ranking? I guess this is a little shady.
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-crowborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-desborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-didcot/
Thanks.
-
If what you've got right now is working for you and bringing in relevant (converting) traffic then I would be cautious about doing anything too drastic. There's always a risk associated with any changes you make like this and the last thing you want to do is kill your own traffic.
I wouldn't immediately tear down the duplicate pages, but I would start to think about how I could update some of the content and maybe create new pages that better engage with your visitors and help to increase your conversion rate (I don't know what your conversion rate is.). That may help off set any impact cause by a potential loss of rankings for those duplicate pages might.If the pages continue to rank then it'll still help!
I've got some thoughts that might be useful (please take this as constructive criticism and recognise that I don't know your niche as well as you do!)
For example, the copy on your home page is "all about you" and very little about what your visitor. What do I get if I book you for an event? What's your value proposition, the benefits of your particular service and how can you differentiate yourself from the competition.
A great place to start is to speak to your last 10 customers and find out why they hired you, what were the things that convinced them to hire you, what were the concerns/doubts they the had?
I'm guessing here (you'll need to talk to your real customers) but if I was hiring you for my wedding, I wouldn't be so worried about the price, or the quality of your routines (I don't know what ground-breaking magic is!) but more concerned with questions like:
- "What if it's all going to be a bit cheesy?"
- Is this going to annoy my guests?
- Is it going to be intrusive?
- Can he work with the venue?
- Can the performance be tailored to the theme of my event or the location?
If you can figure our what really matters to people you can quickly put them at ease and even turn these concerns into benefits.
You might want to also look at how you're using images. It can be hard on the ego, but it's not you that's the important thing here - if you can show more of the reactions and atmosphere that you create then that may help people fell that "yes, I want some of that for my wedding/party etc"
Don't bury your testimonials away on a testimonials page. You've got some great comments there about "delighting guests", "making birthdays special"... I'd use those on your relevant pages. (Personally I think they're more compelling than the "celeb" testimonials.)
Segment your customers and work that group's particular needs/concerns. I'm sure you know the kind of specific issues that come up when your dealing with corporate customers.
I really do think it would help to write the content in the first person, using as natural language as possible. As it stand, the site comes across a bit cold, and doesn't let your personality come across.
Hope this helps.
-
Doug,
Thank you for your response, it solidifys what I have been thinking for the last few months about removing the keyword optimisation on site.
Yes, I do get a lot of work from those pages, and they do seem to convert fairly well. I guess I need to change the title of the website and the copy for human eyes, not google's.
The only fear there is that I drop out of rankings. I guess that is the price to pay if you want to play by the rules!
With regards to the duplicate pages, what should I do then, everyone in my niche is doing it, shall I get rid of them all and bite the bullet!?
-
Nice!
Tom, out of interest, do these pages get much search traffic? What is the conversion rate like on these - do they actually get your any work. If you're not getting any traffic/conversions then just showing up in the SERPS for your keyword is just vanity thing.
If the tactic is getting you work then you obviously don't want to tear it all down, although I'm sure you understand that it's not exactly the kind of thing Google's terms of service are trying to encourage. These kind of tactics are still working, but there's a risk attached too and it's not something I would recommend and not something I'd feel comfortable recommending.
You've got to look at your competition too - and I see that it's a pretty common (almost ubiquitous) tactic used in your niche.
Do you detail the area your cover on your home page? I'm worried that seeing "Magician London" at the start of your page title and the keywords "Magician London" all over the copy could put people off looking for something local.
How can people find out if you cover their area when they visit your site?
The page copy doesn't read very naturally! Have you tried reading it out-loud? I'm, not sure you'd talk to someone like this face to face. I would try to make the text more natural and use the first person. After all, you're trying to sell yourself aren't you, and it's your personality, that's makes you different from your competition.
My general advice would to think less about optimising for search engines, and start thinking about optimising your your visitors, what information are they looking for and what are they trying to achieve on your site...
-
Hi there, this is definitely not a good idea from an SEO stand point. I strongly recommend to you to have the content written uniquely for each of those pages. I have seen methods like these making websites vanish from the index as well as making websites safely pass under the Google's radar. But, we should stick to the best practices and see to it that all the pages on our websites have substantially unique content so as to find and secure their place into the SERPs. Quality content that is unique, fresh, highly relevant, interesting, link and share worthy can literally spell magic for your SEO efforts. Just my two cents my friend.
Best of luck to you,
Devanur Rafi.
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 content site not penalized
Was reviewing a site, www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com, and noted that even though there are over 50,000 total issues found by automated crawls, including 3000 pages with duplicate titles and 6,000 with duplicate content this site still ranks high for primary keywords. The same essay's worth of content is pasted at the bottom of every single page. What gives, Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Removing duplicated content using only the NOINDEX in large scale (80% of the website).
Hi everyone, I am taking care of the large "news" website (500k pages), which got massive hit from Panda because of the duplicated content (70% was syndicated content). I recommended that all syndicated content should be removed and the website should focus on original, high quallity content. However, this was implemented only partially. All syndicated content is set to NOINDEX (they thing that it is good for user to see standard news + original HQ content). Of course it didn't help at all. No change after months. If I would be Google, I would definitely penalize website that has 80% of the content set to NOINDEX a it is duplicated. I would consider this site "cheating" and not worthy for the user. What do you think about this "theory"? What would you do? Thank you for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lukas_TheCurious0 -
Preventing CNAME Site Duplications
Hello fellow mozzers! Let me see if I can explain this properly. First, our server admin is out of contact at the moment,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
so we are having to take this project on somewhat blind. (forgive the ignorance of terms). We have a client that needs a cname record setup, as they need a sales.DOMAIN.com to go to a different
provider of data. They have a "store" platform that is hosted elsewhere and they require a cname to be
sent to a custom subdomain they set up on their end. My question is, how do we prevent the cname from being indexed along with the main domain? If we
process a redirect for the subdomain, then the site will not be able to go out and grab the other providers
info and display it. Currently, if you type in the sales.DOMAIN.com it shows the main site's homepage.
That cannot be allow to take place as we all know, having more than one domain with
exact same content = very bad for seo. I'd rather not rely on Google to figure it out. Should we just have the cname host (where its pointing at) add a robots rule and have it set to not index
the cname? The store does not need to be indexed, as the items are changed almost daily. Lastly, is an A record required for this type of situation in any way? Forgive my ignorance of subdomains, cname records and related terms. Our server admin being
unavailable is not helping this project move along any. Any advice on the best way to handle
this would be very helpful!0 -
Publishing the same article content on Yahoo? Worth It? Penalties? Urgent
Hey All, I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions. Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | moneywise_test0 -
Switching site content
I have been advised to take a particular path with my domain, to me it seems "black hat" but ill ask the experts: Is it acceptable when one owns an exact match location domain eg london.com, to run as a tourist information site, gathering links from wikipedia,bbc,local paper/radio/sports websites etc, then after 6 - 12 months, switch the content to a business site? What could the penalties be? Please advise...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl0 -
Same content, different target area SEO
So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO_MediaInno
2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB" the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T0 -
Duplicate user reviews from hotel based database?
Hello, Just got a new client who has a hotel comparison site, the problem is the reviews and the hotel data is all pulled in from a database, which is shared and used by other website owners. This obviously brings up the issue for duplicate content and panda. I read this post by Dr Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content but am unsure what steps to take. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Its about 200,000 pages. Thanks Shehzad
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shehzad0 -
Possibly a dumb question - 301 from a banned domain to new domain with NEW content
I was wondering if banned domains pass any page rank, link love, etc. My domain got banned and I AM working to get it unbanned, but in the mean time, would buying a new domain, and creating NEW content that DOES adhere to the google quality guidelines, help at all? Would this force an 'auto-evaluation' or 're-evaluation' of the site by google? or would the new domain simply have ZERO effect from the 301 unless that old domain got into google's good graces again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0