Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How does having multiple pages on similar topics affect SEO?
-
Hey everyone,
On our site we have multiple pages that have similar content. As an example, we have a section on Cars (in general) and then specific pages for Used Cars, European Cars, Remodeled Cars etc. Much of the content is similar on these page and the only difference is some content and the additional term in the URL (for example car.com/remodeled-cars and /european-cars).
In the past few months, we've noticed a dip in our organic ranking and started doing research. Also, we noticed that Google, in SERPs, shows the general page (cars.com/cars) and not the specific page (/european-cars), even if the specific page has more content. Can having multiple pages with similar content hurt SEO? If so, what is the best way to remedy this? We can consolidate some of the pages and make the difference between them a little clearer, but does it make that much of a difference for rankings?
Thanks in advance!
-
Makes a lot of sense, thank you.
-
Some great points there Devanur. There is also the option of canonical but the problem is it would mean you're having less pages indexed but one page (the original) would be stronger.
Duplicate content can hurt you but the other side of that is Matt Cutts has mentioned a few times that it wont hurt you unless its spammy, and boiler plate terms you can also normally get away with. For a good nights sleep though its easier just to fix it and know its one less thing to worry about.
Good luck.
-
Hi,
Having multiple pages with similar or identical content confuses the search engines and the outcomes in SERPs will be undesirable. Here is the deal: No two unique URLs should serve substantially similar or identical content. If it is the case, you should decide the URL that you would like to rank in the search engines, make others point to it via rel=canonical attribute. In general, the page that targets the most search keyword/phrase can be made the canonical URL or the preferred URL.
If I were you, I would have added unique content to the existing pages targeting the main keyword for the page.
For example, if the page talks about, 'used cars', this would become my target term for the page:
I would also go ahead with a thorough keyword research & analysis to find which keywords/phrases are being searched more in your geo-location or target market, add corresponding pages with highly targeted content for each of these keywords/phrases (if not added already).
The key here is, content that is unique, up-to-date, highly relevant and useful to the visitors. Such content would bring in dramatic improvements to your overall SEO ROI and search engines like Google love such content and these pages will be awarded good positions in the SERPs going forward. As you know, high quality content is a natural link magnet.
Here is an action plan, if I were you:
1. Make these pages unique by adding unique content
2. Do a thorough keyword research & analysis to find new content opportunities in your niche
3. Add new pages with unique content based on the outcome of step 2.
4. Update the Sitemap.xml file and submit it to webmaster tools
5. Repeat steps from 2 to 4 once in 6 months based on the results or as and when required.
Those were my two cents my friend. Good Luck.
Best regards,
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
-
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
404 Errors flaring on nonexistent or unpublished pages – should we be concerned for SEO?
Hello! We keep getting "critical crawler" notifications on Moz because of firing 404 codes. We've checked each page and know that we are not linking to them anywhere on our site, they are not published and they are not indexed on Google. It's only happened since we migrated our blog to Hubspot so we think it has something to do with the test pages their developers had set up and that they are just lingering in our code somewhere. However, we are still concerned having these codes fire implies negative consequences for our SEO. Is this the case? Should we be concerned about these 404 codes despite the pages from those URLs not actually existing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DebFF
Chloe0 -
Onsite Videos- Multiple on a Single Page- How to Optimize?
I have a specific page which needs multiple videos. A primary video of the client (Youtube Video) and two secondary videos with patient testimonials (Wistia Videos). Here is the actual page: https://www.johnbarrasdds.com/houston-tmj-dentist/ My understanding is Google only values the first video on a page. Is this accurate and either way what is the best practice for how to post the second group of videos and gain SEO value? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mgordon0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0 -
Does font size affect SEO?
In the eyes of Google, would the font text size of say a news article affect SEO? For example, a slightly larger font being easier to read by those with bad eyes? Accessibility? If so, what size would be ideal? 10, 12, 14? Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0