Handling duplicate content, whilst making both rank well
-
Hey MOZperts,
I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites.
URL structure:
Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet)Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here.
My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS.
- Is this possible?
- Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one?
- Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue?
Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best.
Thanks in advance!
-
No. We're actually not launching this initiative for SEO purposes. We just want to create value for our users and having their own stand-alone website is valuable to them.
I just want to make sure we're structured properly from an SEO point of view so that we don't compromise the SEO of our marketplace, or their stand-alone site.
Also, each site has unique content, but it is identical data to their marketplace store. So, every seller has a marketplace store (with items, a profile etc) AND a stand-alone website (with the same items, same profile etc, just designed differently and accessible via a sub-domain).
Hope that makes sense.
-
Thanks so much for your input.
I must admit, I'm not too familiar with Panda, so will need to do some digging there. We literally launched the new version of Zibbet 2 months ago, with different meta data etc, so I'm not sure how that affects it.
If we don't add the rel=canonical, do you think we'll get punished by Google?
-
If I understand correctly, you're asking how you can create a business model that fills up the search results with a bunch of sites that all have the same content. I think you're somewhat late to that party. The Google of today doesn't really let you do that and it's pretty good at preventing it. And if you were thinking of maybe linking back to your main site from all those dupes, I'd rethink that strategy, as well.
-
Hi,
First of all I would really take care of that Panda issue you have there: http://screencast.com/t/SzbL6hTFwWr
To answer your questions:
- Is this possible?
They can't rank both. You need to decide canonical version - the one to rule them all
- Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one?
There are no duplicate content issues but yes, it's best that you chose and don't let google do that for you. Add rel canonical.
- Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue?
That won't help.
Overall you got hit by Panda already - you should take care of what content you push into the index as that's not the way to recover. before pushing more content into the index you should clean the site for all issues related with Panda.
Cheers.
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 page content errors for Web App Login
Hi There I have 6 duplicate content errors, but they are for the WebApp login from our website. I have put a Noindex on the Sitemap to stop google from indexing them to see if that would work. But it didn't. These links as far as I can see are not even on the website www.skemaz.net, but are links beyond the website and on the Web App itself eg : <colgroup><col width="529"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Skemazer
| http://login.skemaz.net |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2Fchangepassword |
| http://login.skemaz.net/Login |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2FHome | Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards Sarah0 -
Duplicate Page Content Errors on Moz Crawl Report
Hi All, I seem to be losing a 'firefighting' battle with regards to various errors being reported on the Moz crawl report relating to; Duplicate Page Content Missing Page Title Missing Meta Duplicate Page Title While I acknowledge that some of the errors are valid (and we are working through them), I find some of them difficult to understand... Here is an example of a 'duplicate page content' error being reported; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com (which is obviously our homepage) Is reported to have 'duplicate page content' compared with the following pages; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/guides/gratuities http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/holland-america-2014-offers/?order_by=brochure_lead_difference http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/about-us/meet-the-team/craig All 3 of those pages are completely different hence my confusion... This is just a solitary example, there are many more! I would be most interested to hear what people's opinions are... Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not. Here are some additional sample links: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Careerbags
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggallini All of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?0 -
Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
Hello, Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain. Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows? Has anyone dealt with something similar? Thanks very much in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCAILLE0 -
What is the best way to allow content to be used on other sites for syndication without taking the chance of duplicate content filters
Cookstr appears to be syndicating content to shape.com and mensfitness.com a) They integrate their data into partner sites with an attribution back to their site and skinned it with the partners look. b) they link the image back to their image hosted on cookstr c) The page does not have microformats or as much data as their own page does so their own page is better SEO. Is this the best strategy or is there something better they could be doing to safely allow others to use our content, we don't want to share the content if we're going to get hit for a duplicate content filter or have another site out rank us with our own data. Thanks for your help in advance! their original content page: http://www.cookstr.com/recipes/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta their syndicated content pages: http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0