Home Page Blog Snippets - Duplicate Content Help?
-
Afternoon Folks-
I have been asked to contribute to a new site that has a blogfeed prominently displayed on the home page. It's laid out like this:
Logo | Menu
HOME PAGE SLIDER
Blog 1 Title
- about 100 words of blog 1 Text
Blog 2 Title
- about 100 words of blog 2 Text
Blog 3 Title
- about 100 words of blog 3 Text
Footer:
--
This seems like an obvious duplicate content situation but also a way I have seen a lot of blogs laid out. (I.E. With blog content snippets being a significant portion of the home page content)
I want the blogs to rank and I want the home page to rank, so I don't feel like a rel canonical on the blog post's is the correct option unless I have misunderstood their purpose.
Anyone have any ideas or know how this is usually handled?
-
It depends a bit on the topics you're discussing. For most sites, it's very difficult to get ranked on your homepage apart when people are looking for your brandname. If your site is mainly covering one topic - and all the blog post on your site are giving additional info on that specific topic or closely related topic it might work.
I would only add additional content on the homepage if it's adding value for the users - it's not really something which is needed for Google (example; when I search for "sports car" on google.co.uk - one of the top results is http://www.classicandsportscar.com/ - which has more or less the same setup as you describe = slider +links to other articles - no specific 'homepage' content)
-
CRO,
Clarity is happening now! When you say blog-feed, you're referring to original blogs actually on the site. NOT a blog-feed showing articles syndicated from some other site. That's a good thing, as I think those links (to your internal articles) will help your ensure those posts get indexed quickly, and might get some link juice too.
While I always think some original introductory content on the homepage is a good thing, now that I understand the blog-feed is to original articles on your actual blog, I won't worry much about where it is on the homepage. I'd simply put the original homepage content anywhere that is feels good for you and the end user.
--A
-
Yep, all internal blog posts and the blogs are 400 - 1000 + words, so that should be covered as well. Thanks for the advice though, I hadn't heard the warning about smaller blog posts.
-
Thanks Anthony -
The content is solid and the posts are all original, so we should be square there.
So maybe a next step option would be to add Original, home page only, content between the slider and the Blog Feed?
For Example:
Logo | Menu
HOME PAGE SLIDER
ADD ORIGINAL HOME PAGE CONTENT
Blog 1 Title
- about 100 words of blog 1 Text
Blog 2 Title
- about 100 words of blog 2 Text
Blog 3 Title
- about 100 words of blog 3 Text
Footer:
--
-
This seems like a pretty normal set-up, and there should not be any need to use canonicals in this case. Just one thing - although there is no such thing as an ideal number of words for a blog item, if your show 100 words of blog 1 on the home, and blog1 only has 120 words in total - it's probably not the best set-up (not for Google, and not for the users, as they would need to click to get only a little bit of additional information)
Update - I assume that blog1/blog2/etc are blog posts written on your site - if they are external blogs this page has little value
-
A blogfeed should be okay, meaning that the site won't be penalized for having it. But the feed's not going to help SEO, either. That blog really needs you to start writing some high-quality unique content ASAP if they want the search engines to rank their site. Also, they should put your good original content at the top, above the fold, and start making the blogfeed a feature of lesser prominence. You're going to want google to see the good/original content first --Hope this helps!
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
-
Email and landing page duplicate content issue?
Hi Mozers, my question is, if there is a web based email that goes to subscribers, then if they click on a link it lands on a Wordpress page with very similar content, will Google penalize us for duplicate content? If so is the best workaround to make the email no index no follow? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Car Dealership website - Duplicate Page Content Issues
Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | karl621 -
How to avoid duplicate content on internal search results page?
Hi, according to Webmaster Tools and Siteliner our website have an above-average amount of duplicate content. Most of the pages are the search results pages, where it finds only one result. The only difference in this case are the TDK, H1 and the breadcrumbs. The rest of the layout is pretty static and similar. Here is an example for two pages with "duplicate content": https://soundbetter.com/search/Globo https://soundbetter.com/search/Volvo Edit: These are legitimate results that happen to have the same result. In this case we want users to be able to find the audio engineers by 'credits' (musicians they've worked with). Tags. We want users to rank for people searching for 'engineers who worked with'. And searching for two different artists (credit tags) returns this one service provider, with different urls (the tag being the search parameter) hence the duplicate content. I guess every e-commerce/directory website faces this kind of issue. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content on search results page?
Technical SEO | | ShaqD1 -
301ed Pages Still Showing as Duplicate Content in GWMT
I thank anyone reading this for their consideration and time. We are a large site with millions of URLs for our product pages. We are also a textbook company, so by nature, our products have two separate ISBNs: a 10 digit and a 13 digit form. Thus, every one of our books has at least two pages (10 digit and 13 digit ISBN page). My issue is that we have established a 301 for all the 10 digit URLs so they automatically redirect to the 13 digit page. This fix has been in place for months. However, Google still reports that they are detecting thousands of pages with duplicate title and meta tags. Google is referring to these page URLs that I already have 301ed to the canonical version many months ago! Is there anything that I can do to fix this issue? I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Example:
Technical SEO | | dfinn
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=9780321676672
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X As you can see the 10 digit ISBN page 301s to 13 digit canonical version. Google reports that they have detected duplicate title and meta tags between the two pages and there are thousands of these duplicate pages listed. To add some further context: The ISBN is just a parameter that allows us to provide content when someone searches for a product with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN. The 13 digit version of the page is the only physical page that exists, the 10 digit is only a part of the virtual URL structure of the website. This is why I cannot simply change the title and meta tags of the 10 digit pages because they only exist in the sense that the URL redirects to the 13 digit version. Also, we submit a sitemap every day of all the 13 digit pages so Google knows exactly what our physical URL structure is. I have submitted this question to GWMT forums and received no replies.0 -
If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
Technical SEO | | watchcases0 -
Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0