Opinion on Duplicate Content Scenario
-
So there are 2 pest control companies owned by the same person - Sovereign and Southern. (The two companies serve different markets) They have two different website URLs, but the website code is actually all the same....the code is hosted in one place....it just uses an if/else structure with dynamic php which determines whether the user sees the Sovereign site or the Southern site....know what I am saying? Here are the two sites: www.sovereignpestcontrol.com and www.southernpestcontrol.com. This is a duplicate content SEO nightmare, right?
-
Hi Joseph,
This is definitely not the ideal scenario. If the two brands are targeting separate markets, why would the copy need to be the same? Your two options would be to change the copy on one of the sites, or just redirect one to the site that is currently performing better.
Hope this helps,
Chris Wilson
-
Yep, that's duplicate content. Two different URLs with essentially the exact same content = duplicate content, regardless of the architecture behind the URLs.
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
-
I added an SSL certificate this morning and now I noticed duplicate content
Ok, so Im a newbie, therefor I make mistakes! Lots of them. I added an SSL certificate this morning bc it was free and I read it can help my rankings. Now I just checked it in screaming frog and saw two duplicate content pages due to the https. So im panicking! What's the easiest way to fix this?? Can I undue an SSL certificate? I guess what's the easiest that will also be best for ranking. Thank you!! Rena
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palila0 -
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
URL Capitalization Inconsistencies Registering Duplicate Content Crawl Errors
Hello, I have a very large website that has a good amount of "Duplicate Content" issues according to MOZ. In reality though, it is not a problem with duplicate content, but rather a problem with URLs. For example: http://acme.com/product/features and http://acme.com/Product/Features both land on the same page, but MOZ is seeing them as separate pages, therefor assuming they are duplicates. We have recently implemented a solution to automatically de-captialize all characters in the URL, so when you type acme.com/Products, the URL will automatically change to acme.com/products – but MOZ continues to flag multiple "Duplicate Content" issues. I noticed that many of the links on the website still have the uppercase letters in the URL even though when clicked, the URL changes to all lower case. Could this be causing the issue? What is the best way to remove the "Duplicate Content" issues that are not actually duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Best strategy for duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a site where all product pages have more or less similar text (same printing techniques, etc.) The main differences are prices and images, text is highly similar. We have around 150 products in every language. Moz's algorithm tells me to do something about duplicate content, but I don't really know what we could do, since the descriptions can't be changed to be very different. We essentially have paper bags in different colors and and from different materials.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690