Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
-
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content.
The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit.
Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 !
Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
-
Hi Jen
We are in the fortunate/crazy situation where we have a custom CMS so the actual redirects are not really a problem from a technical standpoint, it is just wondering if we should
The main site - the biggest and busiest - has a discussion board and a shop, and a blog which the others don't so the articles are about 10% of the indexed content, and about 11% are unique.. the other 2 sites, one has 0.003% unique articles and the other 1.829% ... sounds pretty bad when I put it like that!
We haven't seen a noticeable dip, just general disappointing performance, I think I will try and rope someone into doing a full CSI on the data
Have you seen anywhere that has recovered from a comparable situation? The pondering at this end was that the damage was already done, and that was that.
thanks
-
Hi Fammy!
One thing you could do is to look at the dates the Panda updates hit (http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) against your website traffic for those dates. If you see a dip, you probably got hit.
If not, it's still possible that the duplicate content is holding back your visibility in the SERPs. You can sometimes guess this when you're adding new content and it doesn't really perform as you'd expect it to - but unfortunately, you won't know for sure until you take some action.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you risk getting hit in the future - for example, by a manual penalty - which could even result in the sites being removed.
263,114 is a huge number of duplicate articles and I was just wondering what proportion that is to your overall number of site pages. If it is quite a high percentage, the risk is obviously greater.
I'd recommend you take some action personally. Is there any pattern in the way the archive of articles is structured, to make it possible to write a catch-all 301 rule in your htaccess file that redirects them all to one of the three sites?
For example say your archived articles site in a folder called archive - you'd put this in the htaccess on sites 1 and 2:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase
RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)$ http://www.yoursite3.com/archive/$1 [R=301,L]
... and this would redirect anything in the archive directory to the archive directory on site 3, assuming the file names are exactly the same.
Alternatively if that's not an option, you could look at which of the articles have decent links going to them on sites 1 and 2, redirect those to chosen site 3 and remove the rest, cutting the workload down a little.
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
-
Supplier Videos & Duplicate Content
Hi, We have some supplier videos the product management want to include on these product pages. I am wondering how detrimental this is for SEO & the best way to approach this. Do we simply embed the supplier YouTube videos, or do we upload them to our YouTube - referencing the original content & then embed our YouTube videos? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
I'm setting up my online store in wordpress/woocommerce and want to avoid duplicate content.
Hi Mozers, Apparently I'm using unique content in the short description area and it displays on the pages next to the product photo which is great how it is, but adding informational description repeating on every product page going to hurt us in SEO? A. See here an actual product - (flagged for thin content in OSE)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melinmellow
B. This is how i would like to set each product page to improve them: See here a sample product with additional information/content.
Here's my question: Setting my product pages to the B version would be considered as duplicate content by google?0 -
Duplicate content, the distrubutors are copying the content of the manufacturer
Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
What is considered duplicate content?
Hi, We are working on a product page for bespoke camper vans: http://www.broadlane.co.uk/campervans/vw-campers/bespoke-campers . At the moment there is only one page but we are planning add similar pages for other brands of camper vans. Each page will receive its specifically targeted content however the 'Model choice' cart at the bottom (giving you the choice to select the internal structure of the van) will remain the same across all pages. Will this be considered as duplicate content? And if this is a case, what would be the ideal solution to limit penalty risk: A rel canonical tag seems wrong for this, as there is no original item as such. Would an iFrame around the 'model choice' enable us to isolate the content from being indexed at the same time than the page? Thanks, Celine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
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 -
Parameter Strings & Duplicate Page Content
I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs. Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools. We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site? I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
I need to add duplicate content, how to do this without penalty
On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets. Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list. Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oznappies0 -
Pop Up Pages Being Indexed, Seen As Duplicate Content
I offer users the opportunity to email and embed images from my website. (See this page http://www.andertoons.com/cartoon/6246/ and look under the large image for "Email to a Friend" and "Get Embed HTML" links.) But I'm seeing the ensuing pop-up pages (Ex: http://www.andertoons.com/embed/5231/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=370&width=700&modal=true and http://www.andertoons.com/email/6246/?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=432&width=700&modal=true) showing up in Google. Even worse, I think they're seen as duplicate content. How should I deal with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0