Online household calculator for utility company - SEO thin content issue
-
Hi - I'm working with a utility company that's produced a calculator for individual households.
When you go to their website and type in your address, various household info is pulled across (from various databases) and a calculation is generated on electricity costs/savings per month - the only unique content on each page = numbers. Beyond that, the content on each page is a template.
There is actually a unique URL for each household (when you click on your property name a unique results page is generated).
I'm worried about thin content penalties - is the best option to nofollow noindex these individual household pages (99% of the site!)???
-
Thanks for your input Andy - some good commonsense there Luke
-
Thanks for that superb contribution, Don - helpful beyond words for me, because I've never worked with such a site before - hugely appreciated - Luke
-
HI Luke,
Having dealt with unique but thin content in the past, there are a couple things that come to mind.
First we would start by understanding the goal of this tool. Yes, some people make handy tools for themselves or friends or just to see if they can do it (I made a site that tracks the heat/frequency of Ohio Keno numbers), but usually the purpose is to generate brand recognition or customers; ultimately meaning money.
Once we know the goal of the page we can now move onto how we can use SEO best practice to achieve this goal.
I see two viable options here. The first would be to focus the page on a broad term like "energy comparisons" and possibly throw in the areas that are serviced for localization purposes. To do this you would build the page based on this broad term detail the tool, the use, add videos, help files, pdfs, reports and then rel=canonical the generated URLs back to the main page.
The second option would be to go aggressive and not only target the main page for the broad terms and areas but also target the long tail address's for energy comparisons.
Examples:
- 120 White Elk Lane Energy Use
- 120 White Elk Lane Average Energy Cost
- 120 White Elk Lane Energy Rates
To do this you would have to add more dynamic elements to the code that returns results. That maybe difficult or it maybe extremely easy if the database has more information.
I could easily in-vision this tool returning X rate vs. Y vs. Z company rates, but also returning neighbor's rates 122 White Elk Lane, 123 White Elk Lane, Average Block Rates, Average Community Rates, and compare them to the entered address, adding charts, rate trends, and maps will all be a boon to make the content for 120 White Elk Lane's page be unique. This method removes the thin content and adds tremendous value to anybody looking at buying or selling a home.. just imagine how many real estate companies would link to this page to help sell their listings!
In short you can take one of two approaches, target the broad keywords on the main tool page and canonical the generated urls back to the main page, or add in some dynamic but very helpful content to make the urls unique. You could also start by using the first approach while building the code for the second approach, once finished just remove the canonicals and let the pages rank.
My thoughts and I really hope this helps,
Don
-
It certainly sounds like it Luke. If there is nothing there that is content-worthy, then it 'could' cause issues. I always ask my clients to imagine they are Google and "what would you think if you visited that page to look for great quality content that they should index and share with others".
-Andy
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
-
Web accessibility - High Contrast web pages, duplicate content and SEO
Hi all, I'm working with a client who has various URL variations to display their content in High Contrast and Low Contrast. It feels like quite an old way of doing things. The URLs look like this: domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/ - Default URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=hc - High Contrast page
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=lc - Low Contrast page My questions are: Surely this content is duplicate content according to a search engine Should the different versions have a meta noindex directive in the header? Is there a better way of serving these pages? Thanks.0 -
Technical SEO Issues - Traffic Drop
Hi guys, I hope you're all doing well! We're a small personalised gifts company who specialise in the provision of phone cases, mugs, macbook covers and the like. I head up the Digital Marketing but have little experience in the technical side of SEO and have very limited resources in terms of budget and staffing. Over the past few months, I've been working on stripping down the thin content on the site, fixing duplicate content issues and focusing on other digital channels to boost revenue. However, as of recent we've noticed a significant drop in traffic and our rankings. I've tried to diagnose the problem and I'm convinced there are some technical SEO fixes that need to be implemented. Our website is www.mrnutcase.com If any of you have any ideas, I'd love to hear some of them. Greatly appreciated, Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Duplicate Content: Organic vs Local SEO
Does Google treat them differently? I found something interesting just now and decided to post it up http://www.daviddischler.com/is-duplicate-content-treated-differently-when-local-seo-comes-into-play/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Where is the Real Value in SEO?
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Are tags an issue in SEO
SEOMoz saw that my tags were duplicate pages. Are tags a serious issue in SEO? Should I remove it entirely to prevent the duplicate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visualartistics0 -
SEO - What Should We Do...
Hi Guys, Hope your all OK. Were having major problems with our homepage ranking for our main keyword - we were originally 4 but over the Christmas period our SEO company reported a fault with one of there servers that they were using for links, because of this fault these links were de-indexed from the search engine and in turn we have plummeted to 10th... At the time we had a landing page with an exact match keyword in it, e.g: www.ourdomainname.co.uk/key-word/ we were told to 301 this to our main page in Google but when we have looked today its now showing this page instead of our homepage. We also have another domain that we are using for a forum at the moment, now this domain name is an exact match doming e.g www.keyword.co.uk. The question is do we gamble and 301 our whole site to www.keyword.co.uk and see if we can get this ranking better? Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxter0 -
Breadcrumb Trail for SEO?
Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with and would like some other professional feedback. Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Breadcrumb Trail They have asked us to implement a Breadcrumb trail on every page, where the final page is the only H1 Tag. Are breadcrumb trials important for SEO? (I know they are helpful for Users, but SEO) Are they important for Search Engines to track back for structure. Any thoughts about them? Similar question asked in February : http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trupanion1