Ticket Industry E-commerce Duplicate Content Question
-
Hey everyone,
How goes it? I've got a bunch of duplicate content issues flagged in my Moz report and I can't figure out why. We're a ticketing site and the pages that are causing the duplicate content are for events that we no longer offer tickets to, but that we will eventually offer tickets to again. Check these examples out:
http://www.charged.fm/mlb-all-star-game-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/fiba-world-championship-tickets
I realize the content is thin and that these pages basically the same, but I understood that since the Title tags are different that they shouldn't appear to the Goog as duplicate content. Could anyone offer me some insight or solutions to this? Should they be noindexed while the events aren't active?
Thanks
-
Are you asking about why Moz would or would not consider them duplicate, or why Google would or would not consider them duplicate?
We don't have knowledge of exactly what factors Google uses to detect duplicate content. We approximate the best we can, and give a notice when we see things that look substantially alike.
I did get the two pages in the original question to load. There are only a couple of words that are different, and the rest of the content is identical, including the related events. As a side note, I don't know that people looking for MLB tickets would consider "The Mu Gamma Gamma Chapter Seersucker and Sundress Summer Affair" to be a related event.
-
Also, as a reference, here is a similar situation that a similar site faces:
https://seatgeek.com/menudo-tickets/
https://seatgeek.com/memes-tickets/
Could you explain to me what about the code makes these pages different, seeing as the page copy is exactly the same.
-
Thanks for the response. Yea I tried myself and it didn't load and then took forever to load. They're doing some work on the back end today so maybe that's why. If you try again later then I'd love to have your input.
-
For Moz's duplicate content checker, it's actually looking at code on the page, not just the text visible to the user on the page.
I tried taking a look at your pages, but the site wouldn't load for me.
-
Different title tags do not make them not register duplicate content. It helps with it, but the way duplicate content is figured is by how much of the on page text is the same from page to page.
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
-
Internal Duplicate Content - Classifieds (Panda)
I've been wondering for a while now, how Google treats internal duplicate content within classified sites. It's quite a big issue, with customers creating their ads twice.. I'd guess to avoid the price of renewing, or perhaps to put themselves back to the top of the results. Out of 10,000 pages crawled and tested, 250 (2.5%) were duplicate adverts. Similarly, in terms of the search results pages, where the site structure allows the same advert(s) to appear under several unique URLs. A prime example would be in this example. Notice, on this page we have already filtered down to 1 result, but the left hand side filters all return that same 1 advert. Using tools like Siteliner and Moz Analytics just highlights these as urgent high priority issues, but I've always been sceptical. On a large scale, would this count as Panda food in your opinion, or does Google understand the nature of classifieds is different, and treat it as such? Appreciate thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1 -
How are you taking you e-commerce site forward in 2014
Hi MOZland, With a new (our first e-commerce) client, we're going through a massive learning curve in handling a site of substantial size and complexity for the first time. While we've weeded out most of the on-page stuff that needed sorting, and we're in the process of dumping poor links implemented by previous SEO/online marketing efforts, do you have any suggestions about how to take a big e-commerce site forward in 2014, especially concerning technical pitfalls and link building efforts (and given that guest blogging has become something of a faux pas). Cheers, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
E-commerce Adding New Content - Blog vs New Page
I have an ecommerce site (www.brick-anew.com) focused on Fireplace products and we also have a separate blog (fireplacedecorating.com) focused on fireplace decorating. My ecommerce site needs new content, pages, internal links, etc... for more Google love, attention, and rankings. My question is this: Should I add a blog to the ecommerce site for creating new content or should I just add and create new pages? I have lots of ideas for relevant new content related to fireplaces. Are there any SEO benefits to a blog over new static pages? Thanks! SAM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110