Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate content on recruitment website
-
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:
- How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down?
- Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling
- What can be done to resolve these issues?
Thank you in advance.
-
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
-
-
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
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Will I be flagged for duplicate content by Google?
Hi Moz community, Had a question regarding duplicate content that I can't seem to find the answer to on Google. My agency is working on a large number of franchisee websites (over 40) for one client, a print franchise, that wants a refresh of new copy and SEO. Each print shop has their own 'microsite', though all services and products are the same, the only difference being the location. Each microsite has its own unique domain. To avoid writing the same content over and over in 40+ variations, would all the websites be flagged by Google for duplicate content if we were to use the same base copy, with the only changes being to the store locations (i.e. where we mention Toronto print shop on one site may change to Kelowna print shop on another)? Since the print franchise owns all the domains, I'm wondering if that would be a problem since the sites aren't really competing with one another. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 22, 2020, 2:21 AM | EdenPrez0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 4, 2017, 5:28 PM | Bankable1 -
Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical
I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site. The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL. Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive! My question is as follows: If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed? Hope this makes sense! Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 25, 2015, 2:28 PM | allianzireland0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 14, 2013, 8:21 PM | BobGW0 -
Duplicating an existing website - new name and reskin
Would re-skinning, duplicating an exising ecommerce website with a new domain name cause any ranking issues? The plan would be that all product data, pricing info etc would be identical, the site would have a minor redesign to change colours, logos etc and all duplicate content would be rel=canonicaled to the original site. In case you are wondering the reason for this is a customer with an existing site wants to try out a new brand without incorporating a massive development costs. The majority of traffic would be driving through google shopping, a bit of PPC, social etc. Is this site duplication likely to harm the original site or will setting up rel=canonical to point to the original site going to be sufficient enough to prevent this happening? Is there anything else is should consider? Many thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 9, 2012, 11:54 AM | JustinTaylor880 -
Is SEOmoz.org creating duplicate content with their CDN subdomain?
Example URL: http://cdn.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions Canonical is a RELATIVE link, should be an absolute link pointing to main domain: http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions <link href='[/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions](view-source:http://cdn.seomoz.org/q/help-with-getting-no-conversions)' rel='<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>' /> 13,400 pages indexed in Google under cdn subdomain go to google > site:http://cdn.seomoz.org https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.seomoz.org%2F&oq=site:http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.seomoz.org%2F&gs_l=hp.2...986.6227.0.6258.28.14.0.0.0.5.344.3526.2-10j2.12.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.Uprw7ko7jnU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=97577626a0fb6a97&biw=1920&bih=936
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 27, 2012, 6:36 PM | irvingw1 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 1, 2024, 9:51 AM | Creode0 -
How get rid of duplicate content, titles, etc on php cartweaver site?
my website http://www.bartramgallery.com was created using php and cartweaver 2.0 about five years ago by a web developer. I was really happy with the results of the design was inspired to get into web development and have been studying ever since. My biggest problem at this time is that I am not knowledgable with php and the cartweaver product but am learning as I read more. The issue is that seomoz tools are reporting tons of duplicate content and duplicate title pages etc. This is likely from the dynamic urls and same pages with secondary results etc. I just made a new sitemap with auditmypc I think it was called in an attempt to get rid of all the duplicate page titles but is that going to solve anything or do I need to find another way to configure the site? There are many pages with the same content competing for page rank and it is a bit frustrating to say the least. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated even pointing me in the right direction. Thank you, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 29, 2011, 12:17 AM | WSOT0