Could this be seen as duplicate content in Google's eyes?

[KateWaite]

Hi

I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs.

Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar:

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx

They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level).

At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx

These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages.

I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?

[KateWaite]

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It seems that there is no firm answer on this one - interesting to see you felt there wasn't necessarily an issue of duplicated content but that grouping these pages into themes with a hub page would be of benefit (assuming I've understood your suggestions).

The issue is that in some ways the pages and content is similar, so the trips are focused on the beaches and wildlife of Kenya - a lot of the difference is in the accommodation and level of luxury, which is dealt with in the on page copy. I think we will have to revisit how we handle page titles.

We only fairly recently changed those pages to ensure that all content in the individual tabs is visible to search engines (previously they were only able to crawl the content in the overview tabs, the content of other tabs was effectively hidden). I have checked this in Google Webmaster Tools and it all displays fine / all the tabbed content is found within the html.

Many thanks
Kate

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I'm going to go against the grain and say this doesn't look like a duplicate content issue to me - at least based on text. There's enough unique content on those pages that you shouldn't be falling into those filters. No one can say for sure - that's simply based on my experience.

That said, there are other signals around these pages that are very similar. Namely things like title tags and anchor text.

Title Tags:

• The Wildlife & Beaches of Kenya - Natural World Safaris
• Ultimate Kenya Wildlife and Beaches Safari - Natural World Safaris
• Wildlife & Beach Family Safari - Natural World Safaris

From a topic perspective, are these differentiated enough? They seem to target very similar topics and keywords. ... and the anchor text to these pages follows similar patterns, mostly internal links from the sidebar.

So long story short, these pages may not be differentiated enough that they may be interpreted as dupe content (or thin content topics, as it were) and there simply aren't enough external signals to keep these pages afloat.

The solution may be to consolidate or group these pages into themes. Make sure you have strong "hub" pages that link everything together (think Trip Advisor)

One other thing of note - I notice the page is JavaScript dependent. Because of this, make sure to perform a "Fetch and Render" in Google Webmaster Tools, and make sure the page displays correctly. If it doesn't, be sure to address any issues.

[KateWaite]

Thanks for the replies Andy and Amelia

We cover around 30 destinations and each one has a suggested-holidays page and then maybe 5-15 individual itineraries. Using the copy from any of those itinerary pages will show multiple results in Google as the opening text is being pulled into several other areas on the site.

However, individually a lot of these itinerary pages and overview suggested-holiday main pages rank reasonably well and account for quite a lot of traffic to the site. We can't no-index or use canonicalisation really as each page does have unique content and is different - there is just quite a bit of cross over. At the same time we saw a significant drop with Panda 4.0 and see smaller drops every month with each subsequent update.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how else we can handle this content?

Thanks
Kate

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Kate,

Your assumption about duplicate / similar content appears to be well founded. Just to test a sample, I took the following snippet from this page, and searched in Google:

"Acacia House sits in Ol Chorro Losoit Valley, within the Lemak Hills"

Google returns 4 pages, so yes, there are issues here - and it isn't as straight forward as canonicalisation to fix as this can mean other pages could miss out on a chance to be indexed and returned. However, what you can't tell, is to what degree Google is objecting to these kids of issues. Some say that Google is smart enough to understand what a snippet is, and won't penalise based on this - others disagree. Myself, I try to ensure my clients have unique content on each page and always err on the side of caution.

I also took a snippet from itinerary here and did the same - this time it came back with 5 different pages.

My opinion is that yes, you do have problems that need to be rectified. I know this was only a very quick look, but I shouldn't be seeing so many pages with the same snippets of content in Google. The odd one you can get away with, but I bet I would find lots.

How many unique pages with content like this do you think you have?

-Andy

[CommT]

If you're aggregating content from different pages into one, then you may want to look at canonical tags. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will tell you how to do it