Long list of companies spread out over several pages - duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future.
Here are two pages as examples:
http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1#
http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1#
Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below
Thanks in advance
Aaron
-
Thanks George,
I'll think I'll take your advice and hold off for now.
Aaron
-
Hi Aaron,
First off, since your rankings haven't been affected I would definitely hold off changing anything in WMT unless you're sure as it might cause more harm than good. If you paginate what looks like potentially thousands of pages I'm not convince Google will look on this fondly. The URLs will probably also change regularly as more companies are incorporated because the pages are set to show fixed list lengths.
Resolving the duplicate content onsite is definitely the best course of action. The fact that Moz is crawling these duplicate pages indicates that it's picking up links from somewhere on your site. If you are able to stop exposing these links and only linking to the "preferred version" i.e. canonical then this will give you some control and a better understanding of the site's information architecture.
Regarding setting up of canonicals, I suspect that this will be a harder job as of the 3 duplicate URLs you provide, it's not immediately clear which one would be the canonical. There are probably also thousands of instances similar to this duplicate group across other company lists and Google will have picked at random which one it sees as the canonical on each one. Marking another URL in the group as the canonical stands to (at least temporarily) cause a drop in rankings and SEO visibility if done across thousands of pages simultaneously.
If I was you and I felt compelled to address the issue I would pick a sample ~10% of the duplicate groups, set a canonical on each of them and see what happens in terms of rankings over 3-6 weeks. I would also add the canonicals to a sitemap and try update any links on your website to make sure only the canonical is referenced.
It's risky though, as your rankings are good even though I understand the principle of what you're trying to achieve. When I've tended to do things like this it's when a website has had nothing to lose.
George
-
Hi George,
Thanks for your clear answer.
The reason I am worried is that MOZ is flagging up thousands of these links as duplicate. Looking at it again today I noticed that it is mainly the list pages that are duplicates. EG
http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1
http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=AAA+AUTOMOTIVE+LTD&back=1
http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=A+LIMITED&next=1
These 3 bring up exactly the same page and it seems that every page in the list has 3 or 4 of these variations.
I did a check in WT and it seems that the 'companysearchlist' parameter has been listed but it is not actually affecting any URLs. Would changing the status to 'pagination' help with this? I imagine that it would be then completely ignored by Google. Or would it better to make a canonical for each duplicate issue so each page gets in once?
PS I left the '#' in the last URL by mistake. It is just a tracking parameter that is being used by the company.
Aaron
-
Hi Aaron,
The search experience on the website is a bit unconventional in that you search for a company name and it returns pages of results alphabetically listed with the name you are searching for hopefully in there somewhere!
You could make changes to the pagination using rel=next/previous, but what you're displaying isn't really "true" results pagination. I would therefore be cautious about changing it if the site is ranking well.
Canonicals would only be required if you were showing the same content on different URLs. A quick "site:" search like the below only returns one result, so either Google isn't showing the duplicate URLs (very likely given your question) or it isn't a problem for you:
site:www.formationsdirect.com inurl:companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD
You can look in webmaster tools to see which query string parameters it is picking up and configure the behaviour you want GoogleBot to take. You can also get some sense of the duplication if it is an issue.
Regarding the company page URL you gave, anything after the # in the URL won't get crawled so you don't need to worry about canonicalising those.
Again, if it's ranking well, be very careful about trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If you can find duplicate content then definitely redirect or canonicalise it and see what kind of impact it has. I would do this before taking on anything more significant like the website information architecture and navigation.
George
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
-
Should I change our main category pages to product listing pages?
With the thought of improving user experience, as well as rankings in Google, I'm considering changing our main category pages to product listing pages (with sub-categories remaining, still). These main category pages are very standard and don't link to any informational content, such as buyers guides, etc. What's driven this is the latest Google core update. I've noticed our main competitor (who we were out-ranking before... but not now) now uses this approach. I can see the benefit from a user perspective, i.e. less clicks to reach products. What's the pros/cons from an SEO point of view, please? Could the potential duplication of content be an issue? For context, we have about 2,000 products and website is on Magento 2.
On-Page Optimization | | alifeofjoy1 -
Duplicate content with tagging and categories
Hello, Moz is showing that a site has duplicate content - which appears to be because of tags and categories. It is a relatively new site, with only a few blog publications so far. This means that the same articles are displayed under a number of different tags and categories... Is this something I should worry about, or just wait until I have more content? The 'tag' and 'category' pages are not really pages I would expect or aim for anyone to find in google results anyway. Would be glad to here any advice / opinions on this Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia1 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Help With Duplicated Content
Hi Moz Community, I am having some issue's with duplicated content, i recently removed the .html from all of our links and moz has reported it as being duplicated. I have been reading up about Canonicalization and would to verify some details, when using the canonical tag would it be placed in the /mywebpage.html or /mywebpage file? I am having a hard time to sort this out so any help from you SEO experts would be great 🙂 I have also updated my htaccess file with the following Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | finelinewebsolutions0 -
Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?
So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for. We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at. We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service. The term is "web design brisbane".
On-Page Optimization | | MauriceKintek
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others. Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking? All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears. Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well. Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
Duplicate biographies across several domains?
Hey Gang, We've built a niche specific, manually edited legal community that is full of unique content. (While it's ultimately a directory, and that is often viewed as a bad word in these times, ours is a curated source that doesn't allow anyone and everyone to join.) We feel comfortable that it passes the sniff test post-panda/penguin, etc., and its doing rather well to date. The question we have is do we really need to create unique biographies for each of our legal members? Some of our competitors simply use the same bio information that the lawyer has on their own website and copies that to their site. The competitors I'm talking about are LARGE, well-respected, extremely successful folks, like FindLaw. Here's an example: Lawyer's website bio FindLaw website bio Both rank, etc., and the FindLaw code doesn't place any restrictions on their content regarding the bio., and it's an obvious exact match. I get that duplicate content is primarily a concern among one's own URL and the pages across a specific domain, using rel-canonical, etc., but what about two different domains that need to supply factual information that can't be altered? Is it anything we should worry ourselves with? Any tags we should insert in our code with regard to the bios? Thanks!!! Wayne
On-Page Optimization | | Wayne760 -
Duplicated Content with joomla multi language website
Dear Seomoz Community I am running a multi language joomla website (www.siam2nite.com) with 2 active languages. The first and primary language is english. the second language is thai. Most of the content (articles, event descriptions ...) is in english only. What we did is a thai translation for the navigation bars, headers, titles etc (translation of all joomla language files) those texts are static and only help the user navigate / understand our site in their thai language. Now I facing a problem with duplicated content. Lets take our Q&A component as example. the url structure looks like this: english - www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/ thai - www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/ Every question asked will create two URL, one for each language. The content itself (user questions & answers) is identical on both URL's. Only the GUI language is different. If you take a look at this question you will understand what i mean: ENGLISH VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok THAI VERSION: http://www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok As you can see each page has a unique title (H1) and introduction text in the correct language (same for menu, buttons, etc.) but the questions and answers are only available in one language. Now my question 😉 I guess Google will see this pages as duplicated content. How should I proceed with this problem: put all thai links /th/questions/ in the robots.txt and block them or make a canonical tag for the english versions? Not sure if I set a canonical tag google will still index the thai title and introduction texts (they have important thai keywords in them) Would really appreciate your help on this 😉 Regards, Menelik
On-Page Optimization | | menelik0