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.
No-index pages with duplicate content?
-
Hello,
I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers.
It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have.
Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages?
Thanks a lot for your help!
-
We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten.
So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.
-
Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter. Deindexing will ensure that they never rank, leave them indexed and they have a chance of ranking, worst case scenario is they don't rank well because of it.
-
I think Devanur gives some good advice regarding the gradual improvement of the content, though you're stuck in a bit of a catch-22 with regard to how Google views websites: You want to be able to sell lots of products, but don't have the resources for your company present them in a unique or engaging fashion. This is something that Google wants webmasters to do, but the reality of your situation paints a completely different picture of what will give your company decent ROI for updating vast amounts of product content.
If there isn't an obvious Panda problem, I wouldn't just noindex lots of pages without some thought and planning first. Before noindexing the pages I would look at what SEO traffic they're getting. noindexing alone seems like a tried and tested method of bypassing potential Panda penalties and although PageRank will still be passed, there's a chance that you are going to remove pages from the index that are driving traffic (even if it's long tail).
In addition to prioritising content production for indexed pages per Devanur's advice, I would also do some keyword analysis and prioritise the production of new content for terms which people are actually searching for before they purchase.
There's a Moz discussion here which might help you: http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery.
Regards
George
@methodicalweb
-
Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.
Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:
Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:
1. First, will make the top pages unique.
2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.
3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.
4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.
It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.
-
Hello,
Like I said in my first post, this has already been done. I was asking a specific question.
on another topic, 300 quality pages of content is not possible in the month. We're talking about articles that take at least an hour to write.
That being said, I'll ask my question again: once I have done, let's say, 750 pages of unique content, should I no-index the rest or not. is there something better to do that doesn't involve writing content for 20 000 pages?
Thanks.
-
Very true my friend. If you look at your top pages for last 30 days, there won't be more than 2000 approximately. So you can make the content unique on these over a period of six months or a bit more going at 300 per month. Trust me, this would be an effort well spent.
-
Hello,
I agree with you that it would be the best but like Isaid, writting content for 20 000 pages is not an option. Thanks for your answer!
-
Going off of what Devanur said. Giving your product pages unique content is the way to go. But this can include pictures, sizes, material and etc... I am in the rug business and this is how we pull it off and also how RugsUSA does as well. If you do not however, I would do what Devanur referred to with changing descriptions of your top selling products first.
All the best!
-
Hi,
While its not recommended to have duplicate content on your pages that is found else where, it is also not a good thing to de-index pages from Google. If I were you, I would have tried to beef-up these duplicate pages a little bit with unique content or at least rewritten the existing content so that it becomes unique.
Please go ahead and initiate the task of rewriting the product descriptions in phases starting with the ones that get the most traffic as per your web analytics data. Those were my two cents my friend.
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
-
Duplicate content in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections
Hello everyone! I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct. Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections. I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!! -----------------CODES BELOW--------------- <title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ycnetpro101
{% if page_description %} {% endif %} {% if current_page != 1 %} {% else %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if product %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Artist Bios on Multiple Pages: Duplicate Content or not?
I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print. My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google. Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future. Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution. Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution? Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0