Pages with near duplicate content
-
Hi Mozzers,
I need your opinion on the following. Imagine that we have a product X (brand Sony for example), so if we sell parts for different models of items of this product X, we then have numerous product pages with model number.
Sony camera
parts for Sony Camera XYZ
parts for Sony Camera XY
etc.
So the thing is that these pages are very very similar, like 90% duplicate and they do duplicate pages for Panasonic, Canon let's say with small tweaks in content. I know that those are duplicates and I would experiment removing a category for one brand only (least seached for), but at the same time I cannot remove for the rest as they convert a lot, being close to the search query of the customer (customer looks for parts for Sony XYZ, lands on the page and buys, insteading of staying on a page for Sony parts where should additionally browse for model number). What would you advise to make as unique as possible these pages, I am thinking about:
-
change page titles. meta descriptions
-
tweak the content as much as I can (very difficult, there is nothing fancy or different in those :(()
-
i will start with top top pages that really drive traffic first and see how it goes. I will remove least visited pages and prominently put the model number in Sony parts page to see how it goes in terms of organic and most importantly conversions
Any other ideas? I am really concerned about dupes and a penalty, but I try to think of solutions in order not to kill conversions at this point.
Have a lovely Monday
-
-
I would disagree that this does no harm. If you are targeting the keyword "Sony" for example, it loses relevancy the more you have it dispersed throughout your site with duplicate content. Matt Cutts has a great video here, http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459 where he discusses this. If any of those duplicate pages have keywords, you are losing ranking opportunities.
Have you thought about adding a reviews system to those pages? That helped me a lot with all of the parts and accessories I have on my site. I also started putting them on the main pages to build some prioritization. For example:
My Generator Page: Includes the Generator, then displays the accessory and parts pages. I allow my users to add them to the cart from this page in order to focus the traffic in one location. This has helped my main pages and and my accessory pages.
I added reviews to the parts pages and then helpful tidbits of information where I could. Such as maintenance schedules, how to articles and any other topic I could think of that would be helpful to someone looking for those parts and accessories.
-
In multiple conversations with Google's John Mueller we have discussed this matter. There is NO penalty for internal duplicate content, if its unique to your site then you have nothing to worry about, especially if it is there for genuine reasons.
What John suggests is to focus on top level pages and try to cover the main details on those pages creating on great page to capture the traffic and funnel them down to other pages if need be. If that works you could effectively noindex the other pages.
There is nothing wrong with the way you have it if its genuine and serves a purpose and works in Google. It is always good to add more useful content if you can.
If however its dup content from other sites then I would really make sure you have your own unique content to add.
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
-
Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content
I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries. I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website. They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed. The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”. The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth. This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content. I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content. My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility). I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | cassy_rich0 -
Duplicate Content - Pricing Plan tables
Hey guys, We're faced with a problem that we want to solve. We're working on the designs for a few pages for a drag & drop email builder we're currently working on, and we will be having the same pricing table on several pages (much like Moz does). We're worried that Google will take this as duplicate content and not be very fond of it. Any ideas about how we could integrate the same flow without potentially harming ranking efforts? And NO, re-writing the content for each table is not an option. It would do nothing but confuse the heck out of our clients. 😄 Thanks everybody!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Thin Content pages
I have a couple of pages that are thin content. One is essentially a page with the icons of our customers and a link out to their website. The other is a summary portfolio page that has some images of some of the client work we have done with links to internal pages that have more details about each client situation, approach, etc. These deeper pages are just fine. What is the recommendation for handling these thin content pages? We could add content, but then it wouldn't really help the user very much.
On-Page Optimization | | ExploreConsulting0 -
How to Handle duplicate pages/titles in Wordpress
The wordpress blog causes problems with page titles. If you go to the second page of blog posts it there's a different URL but with the same page title. for example: page 1: site/blog page 2: site/blog/page/2 Each page gets flagged for duplicate page titles. Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
On-Page Optimization | | heymarshall1 -
Duplicate content because of member only restrictions on a forum.
Our website's Community Forum links to the membership profile pages, which by default are blocked for non-members. https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/ https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/member/1301/ We're getting warnings in Moz for duplicate content (and errors) on these member profile pages. Any ideas for how we can creatively solve this problem? Should we redirect those pages or just beef them up with more content? Just ignore it and assume that search spiders will be smart enough to figure it out? See attached video for further explanation. Community_Area.mp4
On-Page Optimization | | Bjork0 -
Duplicate Content on Event Pages
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0 -
Duplicate Content - Meta Data for International Site Roll Out
Hi All, We have a site targeting Ireland, so all on-page SEO is completed and launched on the Irish site. We are now rolling out this site to the UK...how much of this content & SEO meta data has to be changed for Google to not recognise it as duplicate content? Site structure is as follows: http://www.domain.com/ie-en/ - Irish site http://www.domain.com/uk-en/ - UK site Or will it even be considered duplicate content as we have the uk and Irish signals in the subfolders, will be using geo targeting on webmasters, and will have UK specific addresses and phone numbers? We will be rolling this site out to may more countries so would be great to get this straight from the start so we don't waste time creating many versions of the meta data unnecessarily! Many thanks Emma
On-Page Optimization | | john_Digino0