Looking at creating some auto-generated pages - duplicate content?
-
Hi Everyone!
We just launched a new version of our research site and the main CTA on the page sends users to a subdomain that's blocked by robots.txt. The subdomain link is one of our PPC landing pages and they would be duplicate content for every model (cars).
We're also looking at a new content stream of deals pages, on the main domain. The thought process was that we could rank these pages for things like "Volkswagen golf deals" and also use them as canonical URLs from the PPC pages so that Panda doesn't get mad at us for sending hundreds of links to a subdomain that's blocked.
It's going to take us a lot of time to write the copy for the deals pages, so if we auto-generate it by pulling a paragraph of copy from the car review, and numerical stats about that model, will it be classes as duplicate and/or is there any downside to doing it?
Review Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/car-reviews/Ford/Fiesta
Deals Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/deals/Ford/Fiesta
PPC Landing Page: http://quotes.carwow.co.uk/buy/Ford/Fiesta
I can't help but feel that this may all be a bit overkill and perhaps it makes more sense to build 1 central deals page per model with unique content that we can also send the PPC traffic to, then life any block from the quotes. subdomain. But that will take time and we'd also like a quick solution. I'd also question if it's even an issue to link to a blocked subdomain, Google adds the quote URL into the index but can't crawl it, which I've been told is bad - but is it bad enough to do something about?
Thanks,
JP
-
This feels like looking for permission to take a short cut and I personally cannot justify that. I would highly recommend to take the time to make the pages correctly and not even worry about duplicate content or Panda. None of use can tell you if it will "work" or if it'll be seen as duplicate content or when it'll be hit by panda, but if it's auto-generated, I can promise it'll be hit at some point.
However, the worst you can do is test it. Take the top 10% of make/model deal pages and create them how you want. Do it like you're talking and see how they perform. I'm not talking a few weeks, I mean a few months. All the while, be developing the content for some of those pages.
This way, if it works and people like the pages, they are relevant produced the way you want to do it now, the short way, then you can produce the other pages that way. At that point however, your top make/model pages will have unique content that you can put up. So a few months later, you'll have 10% of your deals pages with unique content and the rest automated. Then start working on the next top 10%. Keep going until they are all done.
-
First of all, I think your landing pages look awesome. Especially the review page; it's probably one of the most visual/engaging pages I've seen in a long time. The design and content is awesome and you should be really pleased with the result - It really looks great!
However, I do think the deals page looks quite thin, especially as the review pages are _so _strong. Branded3 published a piece last year on how voucher code websites were impacted by Panda (Source), so I'd be hesitant to use these deals pages. As you state, the quick solution would probably be to roll up all of this content into one article, but I think this would be the best for the consumer, even though it's more time consuming.
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 from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Can i use "nofollow" tag on product page (duplicated content)?
Hi, im working on my webstore SEO. I got descriptions from official seller like "Bosch". I got more than 15.000 items so i cant create unique content for each product. Can i use nofollow tag for each product and create great content on category pages? I dont wanna lose rankings because duplicated content. Thank you for help!
Technical SEO | | pejtupizdo0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Duplicate content + wordpress tags
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
Technical SEO | | giankar0 -
Duplicate Pages Issue
I noticed a problem and I was wondering if anyone knows how to fix it. I was a sitemap for 1oxygen.com, a site that has around 50 pages. The sitemap generator come back with over a 2000 pages. Here is two of the results: http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/services/rentals.htm
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton
http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/1oxygen/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/oxusportableconcentrator.htm These are actaully pages somehow. In my FTP there in the first /portableconentrators/ folder there is about 12 html documents and no other folders. It looks like it is creating a page for every possible folder combination. I have no idea why you those pages above actually work, help please???0