Unavoidable duplicate page
-
Hi,
I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g.
Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Stuart
-
Thanks for your help with this. In the end we decided to go down the nofollow route after consulting the developer with your suggestions.
Stu
-
It's okay, we all just want to give you the best answer we can. It can be tough without specifics to give you actionable advice, but I'll keep trying!
My gut feeling here (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that if there is any appreciable difference in content (as you indicate above), then the dupe content thing may not be a problem. This sort of problem only exists for pages with multiple urls (like in more than one subdomain) or old mirrors that were never taken down and such. If you offer similar services with alot of the same content but slightly different service sections, you shouldn't be flagged for dupes.
Why not skip any tactics for now, get the site launched, remove the older content, and use Moz to run a crawl and see if any further content is flagged? Sounds to me like this is a borderline dupe content issue and may not really be a problem for the engines. I don't think I can really say until the pages are live. Let us know when they are!
-
The content in the 'details' subsections are identical between service 1 and 2, but the details sections aren't identical within their own service sections. Anyone confused yet?! I'm really sorry I can't share any links of the site, it's currently still in development.
Stu
-
Tentative yes. If the subsections are different "pages" it should work the same.
However, since you aren't specific with the URLs, I can't visit the pages to see how exactly appropriate this is. I've optimized thousands of paginated and product pages with this problem, and rel-canonicaling (yes I made up that verb) them worked best for us. If you'd like a more accurate answer, feel free to share example URLs for me to poke around in.
-
That DOES sound cool...
So will that also work for any sub-sections within the product-x section too? I probably should have mentioned but product-x has a sub set of pages which arn't unique e.g.
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-2
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-2
Stu
-
So if you have to FORCE the engines to prioritize one of multiple duplicates, you have a few options. Assuming you want both pages to exist, you can provide a nofollow or noindex rule to one of the duplicates. This is a blunt approach which works well but not really the coolest.
The coolest option is to give one a canonical tag. Telling the engines that one of the multiple duplicates is the "canonical" one is what Google even recommends (and it has all sorts of neat downstream SEO benefits anyway.
So add a "rel canonical" tag to the "proper" page. Matt lays it out here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Let us know how it goes!
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your response. I probably should have said but I have vastly simplified the description of this problem. Product-x is actually made of lots of components and sub pages within itself. Which is the reason I can't re-write product-x for each service section.
So there will be lots of duplicate pages within each product-x section. The service 1 and 2 sections are unique however.
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
Is product-x just one component in each of these services along with other components?
If so, could you not solve this by having content on each of the service pages about those services and then a small amount of info about product-x on each of those pages with a read more type link to product-x on the actual product-x page.
So you would have:
domain.com/service1
domain.com/service2both of which point to a page showing product-x at domain.com/product-x
If that is not possible then there isn't a way around having duplicate pages as I can see it.
Peter
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
-
Will redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
Duplicate page titles for blog snippets pages
I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry, these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Duplicate Page Warnings, hkey and repetitive URLs
Hi, we just put our association's site in SEO Moz so we can tackle SEO and we received thousands of duplicate page content and duplicate title warnings. I searched the forum before asking 🙂 Appreciate some guidance on how many things are wrong with the URL's below that are getting flagged as duplicate page content. 1. Does the repetition of the page title and section hurt SEO? 2. Does the iMIS15 in the URL (the server) detract from relevant ranking? 3. From the forum, it looks like canonical tags should be added to the version of the page that starts with .....?hkey (is there a way to predict and "canonize" these? Or recommendations?) http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx?hkey=6d821afa-e3aa-4bef-bafa-2453238d12c6 http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx Thank you.
Technical SEO | | lyndas0 -
How do I fix Duplicate Content/Title going to memberlist.php page?
I have over 6,000 duplicate title and duplicate content errors going to this link: http://community.mautofied.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=100299 How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | mautofied0