Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
-
Hello everyone,
I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say)
My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation.
So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc.
I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc.
Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles.
So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content.
One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be.
Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify.
Thanks so much in advance
David
-
What's wrong with having ten brass widgets in ten different colors and ten buy buttons all listed on a single page?
I do that I we see lots of people buying a brass widget in every color. I think that this is great for getting more sales. If I was a shopper it would be a real frustration to visit ten pages to get one of each color - or just visit all of those pages to see which color I like best.
Most important, Google might see that and say.... This page has brass widgets in EVERY FREEKING COLOR! and decide to show it to visitors who search for them.
Now, if you are compulsive about having one page per widget and having your writer create yada yada yada content for all of them, keep in mind that you are wasting a lot of money on near duplicate content, boring your writers and spreading your pagerank out over a lot of pages.
-
David, the sub-pages as far as Goggle was concerned fed all the juice to the product page.
No the subpages were not indexed as we told Google they all came from the same page in the canonical.
How do you describe a red widget1 differently to blue widget1? The item is the same but there is only one word different in the content, so we decided to skip a physically different url for the different colours and just use different anchors on the thumbnail images. The title and alt tags would contain specific information about the colour of the widget.
If someone searches for red widget1 and we have keyword strength in widget1 they will get to the widget1 page where they will see the red widget1 and any other colours for that widget1.
The canonical allows you to specify the content origin. So if you have /category/widget1/red and /category/widget1/blue describing the same content you could use /category/widget1 in the canonical ref and both pages would give juice to the main page and get no duplicate content penality.
This only works if you have a small number of variants on each widget as Ryan pointed out, such as size, colour variations etc. Otherwise it is too confusing for humans to follow.
With the amount of content you are looking at, it is probably worthwhile getting a usability study done.
-
SEO = Manipulation doesn't it?
You can call me naive but those days of SEO are either gone or disappearing fast.
I view SEO as working to understand the ever-changing metrics search engines use to rank search results, then applying that knowledge to websites.
We are manipulated into improving our sites to provide a better user experience. The changes we make have lasting value. Other forms of SEO are always one update away from making a post asking "what happened to my site's rankings?"
-
Thanks for the replies, guys.
Oznappies - did that structure mean that all your subproduct pages were pretty much devoid of link juice? Were they even indexed? The big question is if someone searhed for 'red product a' which page showed up? Excuse my ignorance re the canonical stuff.
Ryan, Yes you are right to some degree. I am reverse engineering the website so to speak. But nevertheless I plan to offer huge value to visitors - I have spared little expense with the content writing, usability etc plus we have some fairly radical ideas that should be hugely popular with the visitors.
But I take exception that this is the wrong way to go about it. SEO = Manipulation doesn't it? The old adage 'Just make great content then users will find it and link to it and you'll dominate the serps' is a great theory but we all know in practise it doesn't work like that in 99% of the cases. To get your great product out there you have to give it a push, find an angle to exploit and this targeting of long tail is my angle.
It will be a great site I assure you
-
If the widgets are truly different products, then they should have separate product pages. If you have a weather widget, a currency exchange widget, a local time widget, etc. then you can clearly build unique content for each page.
If you offer a widget in different colors, sizes, etc. but it is really the same widget, you can't effectively generate new content for each page. Your best approach is creating a single, strong page for the widget. The "blue", "yellow" and other widget pages should be canonicalized to the main widget page.
I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles.
That sums it up pretty well. You are having content "written" which often means it is not quality content. You are not willing to write unique content for each sub widget either. You are not developing your site for the best user experience, but instead to manipulate search engine traffic. Google is focused on preventing you from doing exactly what you are trying to do. Even if you succeed, you will be back here in a couple months asking "why did my site drop so far" after Google makes an update to adjust for this type of manipulation.
You have two options. Condense all your content to one widget page, or develop each widget page as if it was the only page on your website. When you sit down and think "I have 10k pages and I need to have content on all of them" your content will be inferior to other sites, and your SERP will reflect as much.
-
We had a similar issue but not to that scale. We had product A in Red, Blue, Green etc the first approach we used a url /category/product?id=subproduct and set id as a parameter in Google Webmaster Tools site config. This passed all the link juice to /category/product and ensured that all pages had the appropriate for the link juice page.
We then decided that all those page loads just to basically show an image for each subproduct were a pain for the customer and so decided to show small images on the /category/product page an use a jquery call to overlay a larger image when the customer clicked a particular product. This produced faster load time and better customer experience.
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 and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com
Hi Mozers! I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com. http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/ It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem. There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google. If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't. How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com? I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that. Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Duplicate pages problem
The Moz report shows that I have 600 Duplicate pages, How can I locate the problem and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Duplicate Footer Content
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page. What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BigStereo0 -
Duplicate Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0 -
Forget Duplicate Content, What to do With Very Similar Content?
All, I operate a Wordpress blog site that focuses on one specific area of the law. Our contributors are attorneys from across the country who write about our niche topic. I've done away with syndicated posts, but we still have numerous articles addressing many of the same issues/topics. In some cases 15 posts might address the same issue. The content isn't duplicate but it is very similar, outlining the same rules of law etc. I've had an SEO I trust tell me I should 301 some of the similar posts to one authoritative post on the subject. Is this a good idea? Would I be better served implementing canonical tags pointing to the "best of breed" on each subject? Or would I be better off being grateful that I receive original content on my niche topic and not doing anything? Would really appreciate some feedback. John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0