Avoiding Duplicate Title Tags and Duplicate Content

[Marston_Gould]

Hi - I have a question on how to both avoid duplicate title tags and duplicate content AND still create a good user experience. I have a lot of SEO basics to do as the company has not done any SEO to this point.

I work for a small cruise line. We have a page for each cruise. Each cruise is associated with a unique itinerary. However the ports of call are not necessarily unique to each itinerary. For each port on the itinerary there are also a set of excursions and if the port is the embark/disembark port, hotels that are associated. The availability of the excursions and hotels depends on the dates associated with the cruise.

Today, we have two pages associated with each cruise for the excursions and hotels:

mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/excursion/?date=dateinport

mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/hotel/?date=dateinport

When someone navigates to these pages, they can see a list of relevant content. From a user perspective the list I see is only associated with the relevant date (which is determined by a set of query parameters).

Unfortunately, there are situations where the same content is on multiple pages. For instance the exact same set of hotels or excursions might be available for two different cruises or on multiple dates of the same cruise.

This is causing a couple of different challenges. For instance, with regard to title tags, we have <title>Hotels in Rome</title> multiple times. I know that isn't good.

If I tried to just have a hub page with hotels and a hub page with excursions available from each cruise and then a page for each hotel and excursion, each with a unique title tag, then the challenge is that I don't know how to not make the customer have to work through whether the hotel they are looking for is actually available on the dates in question. So while I can guarantee unique content/title tags, I end up asking the user to think too much.

Thoughts?

[Marston_Gould]

Thanks!

[ATP]

I would be tempted to have a title and a very short description and potentially a thumbnail image or something. Enough so I can tell what roughly what the excursion is before clicking it. Not so much that I remove the need for clicking to find out more and create loads of duplicate content. That's what I would expect as a user.

[Marston_Gould]

I've been thinking about this more and it brings up a question:

You are suggestion having site.com/cruise1/shoreexcursions/

Should this just be a list with links to the content on site.com/port/shoreexcursions/each-excursion?

[ATP]

The first option question is fairly simply and is doable with a little bit of javascript / jquery and either the data attribute or css classes.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_data.asp <--- For info on the data tag

Say you had your page, you tag each entry with relevant HTML data attributes (I would stick with 1 page listing all of your hotels for example and allow them to be filtered)

• Cruise1/Hotels/

• Hotel 1 (data-food="included") (data-price="19.99") (data-rating="5")

• Hotel 2 (data-food="notincluded") (data-price="9.99") (data-rating="3")

• Hotel 3 (data-food="included") (data-price="4.99") (data-rating="2")

Then a little bit of javascript code activates on a button or drop down menu etc, so when "Food Included" button is clicked make all hotels where data-food="notincluded" vanish. You just repeat the process for every variable your after and can make it as complex or simple as you like. I wouldn't recommend doing it  yourself unless you know how but your developer most likely will, its fairly basic javascript. This method means that all of the information is loaded initially for google to crawl and any filtering happens in the users browser so doesn't hide any information from google bots.

As for the second question. I think your worrying about something that doesnt need to be worried about. In my opinion it doesn't matter if it makes logical sense so long as it makes user sense. If i was using your website and i saw Mediterranean cruises or Italy and greece. I would presume Italy meant just italy, Greece meant just Greece and Mediterranean meant numerous locations across the Mediterranean. I would do it exactly how you have done.

[Marston_Gould]

Well put....

Two last questions -

If excursions or hotels had some kind of categorization - for excursions it might be multiple like level of activity, food included, etc and for hotels it might simply be a star rating and price level, would you create a hub page that then can be filtered by these categories and have the cruise and sailing dates as presets or would you just have static pages that have a list of all the excursions or hotels with the same attribute value or just other suggested options based on similarity?

The other similar challenge I face is cruise categorization:

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Destinations/Mediterranean/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Destinations/Greek-Isles/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Destinations/Italy/

The last time I checked, Italy was in the Med and so is Greece. Med is being used for cruises that touch more than one country (primarily Greece and Italy) whereas Greece may include cruises that touch Turkey and Italy those that touch Spain and France.

I think that's pretty confusing to customers who are trying to find what they are looking for.

At the high level, it would be pretty easy to categorize into /Med, /Northern-Europe, /Caribbean, /South-Pacific, /Latin-America

But I still get into a corner with the page below this level yet above cruises

[ATP]

If it were my site I was building from scratch I would have the following layout.

• Home Page

• Port A

• Hotels

• Hotels 1

• Hotels 2  (site.com/porta/hotels/hotelname)

• Excursions

• Excursion 1

• Excursion 2 (site.com/porta/excursions/excursionname)

• Port B

• Port C

Obviously Port B & C would mimic port A. This way each hotel, each excursion and each port would each have a unique page crafted and target towards keywords each with a unique title and page content.

Then I would address the cruises themselves I would have a landing page for each cruise like you do now, this page would have a unique title and content (all your descriptions etc that remain constant.)

• site.com/cruise1/
• site.com/cruise2/
• site.com/cruise3/

Then a page for each for each category under each of those as below, again this would have a consistant title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) etc

• site.com/cruise1/

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• site.com/cruise1/shoreexcursions/

• site.com/cruise1/hotels/

Then importantly, I would have the content on these pages dynamic and changeable rather than creating a new page. So if i had 2 dates for cruise 1  (2nd and 17th for example) instead of having

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/2nd
• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/17th

which would create 2 pages with the title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) I would have

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• dropdown menu containing all dates

• div containing timeable

• div containing list of ports

As standard these page would have the closest cruise information so there was always content. Then have a database containing all the information on a set cruise. If 2nd is selected from the drop down menu. The (div timeable) is updated to the new values and (div ports) is updated to a list of ports. These links can then go towards the static page created that remains constant.

Edit:

This should stop duplicate pages and titles and keep the very user friendly format you have now.

[Marston_Gould]

Essentially yes - but perhaps I can share these scenarios:

Cruise 1ABn = cruise itinerary 1 going from A to B at time n

Cruise 1ABm = cruise itinerary 1 going from A to B at time m

Cruise 2ACl = cruise itinerary 2 going from A to C at time l

So yes the shore-ex and hotels in port A on cruise 1 could be identical if inventory was the same, although on some occasions, we may not have the exact same set of partners. Cruise 2, also going through port A could also have a similar subset as well.

From a user perspective, being able to see all the shorex and hotels on a single tab associated with my cruise is easy, but from a content and title tag perspective, leads to many duplicates content blocks on page and in some case a completely duplicate.

[ATP]

Hi Marston,

This is still rather confusing, but I think im on the right line of thinking. Let me know if this is correct.

Lets take 2 cruises both to the same location on different dates, my search parameters return

Cruise1 June to USA
Cruise2 July to USA

Is your problem (simplified) that

website.com/cruise1/shore-excursions/      &    website.com/cruise2/shore-excursions/

would be exactly that same as each other and when you compound this into many cruises with many variables you get many pages with many duplicated titles and content?

[Marston_Gould]

Sure thing...

So here is website: www.windstarcruises.com (we're just around the corner from Moz!)

Example:

Cruise Overview Page, Itinerary Page, Shorex, Hotels,

http://www.windstarcruises.com/cruise/Italy/Classic-Italy-and-Dalmatian-Coast/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Cruise/Itinerary-Ports/Italy/Classic-Italy-and-Dalmatian-Coast/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Cruise/Shore-Excursions/Italy/Classic-Italy-and-Dalmatian-Coast/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Cruise/Hotels-Tours/Italy/Classic-Italy-and-Dalmatian-Coast/

http://www.windstarcruises.com/Cruise/Offers-Pricing/Italy/Classic-Italy-and-Dalmatian-Coast/

Here is what I've had developers already do:

(1) Previously, each of the different sailings on same cruise had same URL, differentiated only with query parameters. Once a sailing went into past, that URL would expire and would not render.  Now the URLs all display without query parameters. When the URL is presented without query parameters, the next sailing is presented and if the URL presented has expired, it redirects to the URL without parameters.

(2) All the URLs with parameters are canonical to the URL without

Next when I started looking at Title Tags, they are a complete mess and this is what led me to realize that the entire taxonomy is a mess.

What I'm considering:

(1) Combining Overview and Itinerary Pages

(2) Creating Port Pages accessible of Itinerary Pages, one Port per Page

(3) Content on Port Page would be constant

(4) Link off of Port Page would go to Excursions Hub for port and as appropriate Hotel Hub

(5) Excursion Hub would then list all the Excursions at that port linking to unique Excursion Pages with calendar showing which cruises it is available, price and availability

(6) Hotel Hub would be similar to above

(7) Each excursion and hotel would have links to similar set so that it is easy to move from excursion to excursion and hotel to hotel

If I did this, I would have one page per hotel, one page per excursion and could use the calendar to change a query parameter to pull in the appropriate data. This would eliminate duplicate content and allow very unique titles, descriptions and would likely act as bait for each of the vendors to provide their own link in.  I could also show reviews and other added content.

My biggest issue would be how to allow someone to keep omnipresent what cruise they are considering associated with the excursions and hotels they are looking at.

I think short of this change, I'm going to have a mess

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Marston

This would be easier with examples - is that possible to provide? I would love to help but your description is a bit confusing.

Off the top of my head, I would suggest you read into Google's resources on categorizing your parameters, canonical tags, and possibly pagination. These are pretty indepth and may help you find the answers you are looking for. I would also see what you are able to do about your title tags because that is a big on-site SEO ranking factor and you want to make sure those are as unique as possible.

But again, if you could provide an example, that would be a huge help!

Let me know - thanks so much!