Duplicate content on recruitment website

[iQi]

Hi everyone,

It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason.

The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content.

Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed).

The questions here are:

1. How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down?
2. Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling
3. What can be done to resolve these issues?

Thank you in advance.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Issa,

You're right, duplicate content and bad usability could be triggering the slow rolling Panda 4.2, but I'd dig in a little more (apologies if you already did this research):

• You mentioned 200 pages are potentially duplicate; how many are on the site in total? If you have thousands of pages indexed, 200 duplicates probably aren't going to cause a Panda penalty.

• How similar are these postings? Just the page title? Or is the entire page extremely similar in content? (To answer this: if you made a keyword cloud for these similar job descriptions, would they show roughly the same mapping?)

• If it's just the page title that's similar, make sure to set the pages apart by including the name of the hiring company (which I assume makes the different positions unique) towards the beginning of the page title

• If the entire page is similar, then add more content to make the pages more unique, like a blurb about the hiring company, how long the job has been up, how many applicants the job has (if available), etc.

• Either way, make sure you don't have any old jobs that still have live pages! If possible, I'd redirect them to a similar job posting.

• Like John asked, did your traffic drop dramatically one day, or has it been tapering off? If it's tapering off, I'd guess it's not Panda.

• And, last, which pages lost traffic and rankings? Which keywords dropped in rankings? You may be able to tell how you were penalized by which keywords were most affected.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

[dohertyjf]

Hi Issa -

Great question here. Seems your client is potentially in a tough spot with this!

There is a ton to unpack here and it is hard to know specifics without the site (feel free to private message it to me), but to your specific questions:

• Re: if it is a problem that the jobs have the same title, that is only something you can answer with the analytics data you have access to. It usually is not a problem, but when you have this sort of situation I'd also ask if you have category pages for those terms (eg 20 Growth Hacker jobs in SF a day, but also a "Growth Hacker Jobs in SF" category where all those individual jobs link back up to
• Regarding syndication of content, this can cause an issue if not done correctly. You'd have to see where they lost traffic (you hopefully already know), but if it's the case with syndicated listings losing traffic and non-syndicated not, this is an issue. What I've often done is either get the site we are syndicating to to implement a canonical back to my listing, or get a followed link from their version back to yours. Also, you can be selective about what you syndicate so that it's a small duplication vs complete. Also, make your pages more robust and only syndicate the necessary info if possible.
• Website usability can be bad for Panda, especially if bounce rates are really high. Check those and see if they are high. If they are, you should fix it anyways because you'll get better conversions. I've also heard of cases where they made their site "stickier" and they bounced back from Panda.

I guess it's hard to know if Panda is still rolling out, but from everything  I have heard it is. I assume this was not just a one-time drop on one day, but rather a slow leak of traffic? That makes it harder to investigate if the second.

Good luck!

John

[iQi]

Great thank you.

Will have a read.

Still though, with the situation above, is it OK for this industry to have such duplicate content and what to do about it if its not.

Thanks

[TimHolmes]

I was reading an article earlier from SEO RoundTable, where it details that Duplicate content is a side issue and not necessarily related to the Panda Update - read more here - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-duplicate-content-panda-issues-different-21039.html

John Mueller stated that sites with low quality content are hit by Panda and that duplicate content is a separate side issue.