Duplicate Page Content on pages that appear to be different?
-
Hi Everyone! My name's Ross, and I work at CHARGED.fm. I worked with Luke, who has asked quite a few questions here, but he has since moved on to a new adventure. So I am trying to step into his role. I am very much a beginner in SEO, so I'm trying to learn a lot of this on the fly, and bear with me if this is something simple.
In our latest MOZ Crawl, over 28K high priority issues were detected, and they are all Duplicate Page Content issues. However, when looking at the issues laid out, the examples that it gives for "Duplicate URLs" under each individual issue appear to be completely different pages. They have different page titles, different descriptions, etc. Here's an example.
For "LPGA Tickets", it is giving 19 Duplicate URLs. Here are a couple it lists when you expand those:
http://www.charged.fm/one-thousand-one-nights-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/trash-inferno-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/mylan-wtt-smash-hits-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/mickey-thomas-ticketsInternally, one reason we thought this might be happening is that even though the pages themselves are different, the structure is completely similar, especially if there are no events listed or if there isn't any content in the News/About sections. We are going to try and noindex pages that don't have events/new content on them as a temporary fix, but is there possibly a different underlying issue somewhere that would cause all of these duplicate page content issues to begin appearing?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
Nothing will positively effect this issue more than updating the content and giving the searchers solid, informative, unique content to read.
One way to do that might be to aggregate some reviews for these individual shows, give a short, unique bio of the performers, or rate the venues. 500-800 words of unique content will go a long way in this case.
Something else to work on would be the amount of internal links back and forth. When links are all robot sees, that becomes your duplicate content issue too. You can't do too much about that in this case. Most of the links come from the nav bars, so, the way to counter it would be again, adding great content.
-
Well, if it were one of my clients sites… I wouldn't do that. While I understand your logic with a noindex, I wouldn't want to create a situation where the pages would not be about to be found at all in search engines. Although it will drop your duplicate content numbers here on Moz, it's only a temporary fix. I guess a good question to explore is how long you will need to keep them as a noindex versus how long it would take to fix the content issues.
-
Hey Adam!
thanks for the response, that kind of confirms what we were thinking. So we are planning to put in a noindex follow on those pages while we work on adjusting the content/descriptions. Is that a good fix while we work on the pages or is there something else we should be doing?
-
Hey Ross!
Those pages are not "different" when it comes to search engines. Or maybe I should say, not different enough. The content is extremely thin and only switching out a word or two will absolutely make them come up as duplicate content. I would strongly suggest optimizing the page content and meta descriptions to be unique.
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
-
Crawl report - duplicate page title/content issue
When the crawl report is finished, it is saying that there are duplicate content/page titles issues. However there is a canonical tag that is formatted correctly so just wondered if this was a bug or if anyone else was having the same issues? For example, I'm getting a error warning for this page http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/categories/categories_travel?sort=name_asc&searchterm=&page=1&layout=table
Moz Pro | | KarlBantleman0 -
Rankings Different in Serps from Report
My site shows up on page one for many search queries, but I'm "not in the top 50" for those same terms according to the rankings report. Having troubleshooted the problem, it may be a canonical issue. I did not include www when I originally set up my reports and it seems that my site shows up in search results with www. However; if you type in the url without the www, it will automatically forward to the page with www. I did this intentionally in order not to get penalized for duplicate content pages. So here's my question: If I've got one page redirected to the other, shouldn't the rankings report also follow that redirect? If so, then it should show the correct results, right? Thanks, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
How long will it take for Page Rank (or Page Authority) to flow via a 301 redirect?
I've recently redeveloped a static site using WordPress and have created 301 redirects for the original urls to the new urls. I know I won't get all the value passed via the 301, but I'm hoping some will. Any idea how long this may take? It's been nearly a month since the changeover so wondering if it would be weeks, months or more?
Moz Pro | | annomd0 -
Sorting Dupe Content Pages
Hi, I'm no excel pro, and I'm having a bit of a challenge interpreting the Crawl Diagnostics export .csv file. I'd like to see at a glance which of my pages (and I have many) are the worst offenders for dupe content – ie. which have the most "Other URLs" associated with them. Thanks, would appreciate any advice on how other people are using this data, and/or how 'Moz recommends to do it. 🙂
Moz Pro | | ntcma0 -
Ranking Differs between SEOmoz and Google Webmaster?
My Google webmaster ranking for keywords differs significantly from SEOmoz. For example, Webmaster say 8 and SEOmoz says 1...thoughts?
Moz Pro | | mjcarrjr0 -
Only 1 page has been crawled. Why?
I set a new profile up a fortnight ago. Last week seomoz crawled the entire site (10k pages), and this week has only crawled 1 page. Nothing's changed on the site that I'm aware of, so what's happened?
Moz Pro | | tompollard0 -
How do i get rid of a duplicate page error when you can not access that page?
How do i get rid of a duplicate page error when you can not access that page? I am using yahoo store manager. And i do not know code. The only way i can get to this page is by copying the link that the error message gives me. This is the duplicate that i can not find in order to delete. http://outdoortrailcams.com/busebo.html
Moz Pro | | tom14cat140 -
On Page Optimization Reports - Huh?
I've been working hard to use this EXCELLENT tool for optimize some of what I consider my most important pages . . . But the automatic tool that pulls pages and grades them (the "summary" of the "on page" report) . . . I don't get it. It only graded three of my pages, and I don't understand how it chose what keywords to grade it for? I'm just very confused. I don't understand how it chose the pages to grade, not the words it chose to grade it against. 😞
Moz Pro | | damon12120