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
-
Duplicate content flagged by Moz that's not actually duplicate content at all
Hi, Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
Moz Pro | | Caro-O
Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar. Has anyone else had this experience? ~Caro1 -
Duplicate Content: Marketing Page / Content Page
So I am getting duplicate content warnings on my website for my pages white paper and webinar video pages. Each white paper / webinar video page is behind a marketing form page that must be filled out. I am getting a lot of warnings that the marketing page and the content page are being picked up as duplicated content. In the past, both the marketing page and the content page were given the same title and url, the body content is not similar. My question: Is the URL / Title similarity enough to set off the duplicate content warnings and would changing one or the other solve the issue?
Moz Pro | | AllMedSeo0 -
Videos on duplicate content editing
Hi, I am looking for good videos with visual examples on how to edit duplicate content issues. I am editing a law firms website, and for the most part the duplicate issues seem to show up in tag URL's on the blog. I feel like I have maybe half of the picture figured out, but I am not sure how or where to make changes. I have gone through the crawl diagnostic issues and a few articles, but I know I am a visual learner. Therefore a video might be helpful. Does anyone have any suggestions on where to get started? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | DigitalEnvy0 -
When will links appear
When will links appear? Hi I submitted one of our products to a range of beauty bloggers and all of the reviews came back, really positive, along with links to our site. However when I run a back link report in open site explorer only one of these links is showing up even though the links all went live at about the same time. Can any one explain this in discrepancy?
Moz Pro | | Hardley10 -
Duplicate page content on / and index.php
Hi I am new to SEOmoz and in the crawl diagnostics for one of my clients it came back duplicate content on the homepage www.myclient.co.uk and on the www.myclient.co.uk/index.php which is obviously the same page. I understand that the key is to do a 301 redirect from the index to /, however how will I know that this will not just create an ever ending loop on the server? From your experience how is the best way to tackle this crawl error? Also is there a specific question that I need to ask the server?
Moz Pro | | search_shop0 -
SEOmoz crawler and duplicate content
Does anybody know if the SEOmoz crawler picks up canonical tags when its looking for duplicate content? I've got a ton of errors in one of my projects even though they all have canonical tags. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | neooptic0 -
How To Solve Too Many On-Page Links In Blogger?
Hi, I Have An Issue Too Many On-Page Links In My Site And I Saw That There Are More Than 300 On Page Links On My Home Page URL. My Site Is Hosted On Blogger. So Please Tell Me How To Fix This Problem In Blogger.
Moz Pro | | MaherHackers0 -
Redirecting duplicate .asp pages??
Hi all, I have a bit of a problem with duplicate content on our website. The CMS has been creating identical duplicate pages depending on which menu route a user takes to get to a product (i.e. via the side menu button or the top menu bar). Anyway, the web design company we use are sorting it out going forward, and creating 301 redirects on the duplicate pages. My question is, some of the duplicates take two different forms. E.g. for the home page: www.<my domain="">.co.uk
Moz Pro | | gdavies09031977
www..<my domain="">.co.uk/index.html
www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.asp</my></my></my> Now I understand the 'index.html' page should be redirected, but does the 'index.asp' need to be directed also? What makes this more confusing is when I run the SEOMoz diagnostics report (which brought my attention to the duplicate content issue in the first place - thanks SEOMoz), not all the .asp pages are identified as duplicates. For example, the above 'index.asp' page is identified as a duplicate, but 'contact-us.asp' is not highlighted as a duplicate to 'contact-us.html'? I'm a bit new to all this (I'm not a IT specialist), so any clarification anyone can give would be appreciated. Thanks, Gareth0