How to deal with 80 websites and duplicated content
-
Consider the following:
A client of ours has a Job boards website. They then have 80 domains all in different job sectors. They pull in the jobs based on the sectors they were tagged in on the back end. Everything is identical across these websites apart from the brand name and some content.
whats the best way to deal with this?
-
Interesting question. I've never dealt with a problem like this, so you should probably take my advice with a grain of salt. The issue has come up in the forum before: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-from-multiple-sources-cross-domain. Matt Cutts also posted about this last year.
I imagine that your clients want all of their domains to rank, and to pull in traffic, so using NOINDEX is not an option. The simplest option would be to find a way to add some unique content to the pages - although again, at scale this might be a significant amount of work. More billable hours, that's all.
So, my plan of action would be to determine if this is really an issue in terms of ranking for the client (it might not be), and if it is, use the backend of their sites to display unique content on each site. It probably wouldn't hurt if the sites looked a little bit different from each other.
Hope that helps.
-
Cross-domain canonical tags?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
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 analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
Many Errors on E-commerce website mainly Duplicate Content - Advice needed please!
Hi Mozzers, I would need some advice on how to tackle one of my client’s websites. We have just started doing SEO for them and after moz crawled the e-commerce it has detected: 36 329 Errors – 37496 warnings and 2589 Notices all going up! Most of the errors are due to duplicate titles and page content but I cannot identify where the duplicate pages come from, these are the links moz detected of the Duplicate pages (unfortunately I cannot add the website for confidentiality reasons) : • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_2=&products_per_00&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&page=2 With these URLs it is quite hard to identify which pages need to be canonicalize. And this is jsut an example out of thousands on this website. If anyone would have any advice on how to fix this and how to tackle 37496 errors on a website like this that would be great. Thank you for your time, Lyam
Technical SEO | | AlphaDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)
Hi All, I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”. The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them). Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory. From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages. Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is. We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages? Has Google simply determined this one to be the original? What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page? Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Justin
Technical SEO | | JustinGeeks0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Duplicate Content - Just how killer is it?
Yesterday I received my ranking report and was extremely disappointed that my high-priority pages dropped in rank for a second week in a row for my targeted keywords. This is after running them through the gradecard and getting As for each of them on the keywords I wanted. I looked at my google webmaster tools and saw new duplicate content pages listed, which were the ones I had just modified to get my keyword targeting better. In my hastiness to work on getting the keyword usage up, I neglected to prevent these descriptions from coming up when viewing the page with filter parameters, sort parameters and page parameters... so google saw these descriptions as duplicate content (since myurl.html and myurl.html?filter=blah are seen as different). So my question: is this the likely culprit for some pretty drastic hits to ranking? I've fixed this now, but are there any ways to prevent this in the future? (I know _of _canonical tags, but have never used them, and am not sure if this applies in this situation) Thanks! EDIT: One thing I forgot to ask as well: has anyone inflicted this upon themselves? And how long did it take you to recover?
Technical SEO | | Ask_MMM0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
Duplicate Content Penalties, International Sites
We're in the process of rolling out a new domestic (US) website design. If we copy the same theme/content to our International subsidiaries, would the duplicate content penalty still apply? All International sites would carry the Country specific domain, .co.uk, .eu, etc. This question is for English only content, I'm assuming translated content would not carry a penalty.
Technical SEO | | endlesspools0