Duplicate pages or note? Variations just due to language changes?
-
I have some pages marked as duplicates, so I want to do what I can to solve the issues concerned.
One issue concerns duplicates where the page content is indeed the same except for the language that the content is offered in.
The URL for example of the documentation page of the site, in English is as follows:
http://www.domain.com/support/documentationWe then have the same content in German, French, Russian using the following URLs.
http://www.domain.com/de/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/fr/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/ru/support/documentationEach page has links to PDFs which are all in fact in English so the links to the docs are the same. Moz is flagging up all these pages as being duplicate content (which it is when translated back into English, but is not if you just consider that they are using completely different languages!)
Has anyone any thoughts on how to solve this? Or is this something not to worry about / disregard?
Many thanks
Simon
-
Ryan - thank you too for taking the time to respond.
Had a quick peek at the blog you noted - going to go back and read it v-e-r-y slowly!
Ditto, many thanks re the webconfs link - plenty of fun tools to try out there. Am sure it will all deepen my learning / confusion!Thanks again!
-
Don - thank you so much for responding
I think you may well have identified the issue too! The documentation page is the same in each case - has a table with e.g. 4 columns and 20 or so rows - and I guess much of the structural content of the pages, irrespective of the linguistic variations of the text shown on screen, is the same.
Will look closer at this.
Assuming this is the case - the next logical questions would be: Does it matter in terms of SEO? Or is it a kind of 'false positive' which can be noted but ignored? What could I do about it anyway? I guess the answer is implied in your answer above: change the template for each language?
Allied to this, is the fact that since the site is 'growing' with multiple language versions, the problem seen with this sample page will potentially be replicated all over the site. Again, the big question is about the effect on SEO. Web pages are scoring well for brand terms and other important words, and while there are new phrases and words to focus on, I am unsure whether correcting these is to prevent strict penalties or simply to make already-decent rankings as good as they can be.
Thanks in advance for any further points you care to make.
-
Hi Simon. Don has given you some good guidance. Here's a recent Moz Dev Blog post on the subject: https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/. Note their images explaining much of what Don described. Two pages having enough shared phrases (because of the header, footer, nav, etc) can trigger the duplicate warning. While the latter part of the dev blog post certainly gets technical, it should explain why you might be getting duplicate content warnings even further if that's your bent.
Since each tool is a bit different you can also check your pages with other tools, such as: http://www.webconfs.com. Cheers!
-
Hi Simon,
Okay so crawlers can crawl PDF's unless they are encrypted / encoded. However since they link to the PDF that shouldn't be the issue.Ref: googleblog
How much content are on these pages? I ask because when there is thin content you may find that the template itself is causing the duplication problem, unless of course you are using different templates for each language as well.
Take for example a page that reads.
en: The woman eats frozen fruit daily.
de: Die Frau isst gefrorenes Gemüse jegen tag.
es: La mujer come las verduras congeladas diariaNow surround each of those pages with a header content, footer content, right / left column content same images same alt tags and the deviation of content is so small it is not noticed.
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
-
Blog archive pages are meta noindexed but still flagged as duplicate
Hi all. I know there several threads related to noindexing blog archives and category pages, so if this has already been answered, please direct me to that post. My blog archive pages have preview text from the posts. Each time I post a blog, the last post on any given archive page shifts to the first spot on the next archive page. Moz seems to report these as new duplicate content issues each week. I have my archive pages set to meta noindex, so can I feel good about continuing to ignore these duplicate content issues, or is there something else I should be doing to prevent penalties? TIA!
Technical SEO | | mkupfer1 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Why do I get duplicate page title errors.
I keep getting duplicate page title errors on www.etraxc.com/ and www.etraxc.com/default.asp, which are both pointing to the same page. How do i resolve this and how bad is it hurting my SEO.
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Duplicate Home Page content and title ... Fix with a 301?
Hello everybody, I have the following erros after my first crawl: Duplicate Page Content http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Duplicate Page title http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Do you think I could fix them redirecting to http://www.peruviansoul.com with a couple of 301 in the .htaccess file? Thank you all for you help. Gustavo
Technical SEO | | peruviansoul0 -
Duplicate content by category name change
Hello friends, I have several problems with my website related with duplicate content. When we changed any family name, for example "biodiversidad" to "cajas nido y biodiversidad", it creates a duplicate content because: mydomain.com/biodiversidad and mydomain.com/cajas-nido-y-biodiversidad have the same content. This happens every tame I change the names of the categories or families. To avoid this, the first thing that comes to my mid is a 301 redirect from the old to the new url, but I wonder if this can be done more automatically otherwise, maybe a script? Any suggestion? Thank you
Technical SEO | | pasape0 -
Removing Duplicate Pages
Hi everyone. I'm sure this falls under novice seo question. But how do i remove duplicate pages from my site. I have not created the pages per say. Their may be a an internal link on a page that links to the page causing the duplication. Do i remove the internal link here is a sample of a duplicate page http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fabout%2fticket-industry-news.aspx http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fhome.aspx&CntPageID=1 I know the url is way too long. working on it Thanks for your feedbacks.
Technical SEO | | ticketplatform0