Duplicate Content on Website with Multiple Locations
-
Hi there,
I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do.
We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1), and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help.
We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings?
Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.
-
HI,
It doesn't redirect the user, no. It tells Google 'which URL' you prefer to be indexed. Now, again I don't believe that this is the best option, as you want BOTH cities to rank. Does it affect the rankings? Yes, because you are saying Page A is more valuable than the duplicated Page B- leaving Page B out in the wild as the less important page for ranking.
So, again having two versions of the domains ( based on the cities) isn't beneficial, these should both be under one domain ( wp installation) and adding a "locations" page, to reduce the self competition.
-
Thank you for your help Tammy. I read through your links when you first replied and they helped a lot.
Pardon my lack of knowledge here, but I just want to make sure I understand correctly: If I go the rel=canonical route for the "duplicate" pages, it won't actually redirect the user, but will just tell google where the "original" page lives, and that it's duplicated on purpose correct? Does that then hurt the rankings for the site that's not showing as the "original" content?
Thanks again for your help.
-
While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.
Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.
Here are a few articles about that:
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains
Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.
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
-
Content suggestions
Hello, I am looking at the content suggestions in the page optimisation section and was wondering why the system says that some pages cover some topics and some don't cover it ? Is it based on finding "noun phrases" that co-occurre (twice the same one) ? or "noun phrases" that are used in the same context (even though they are different) ? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | seoanalytics0 -
Significant difference with DA scores on Moz Chrome app VS Website Tool
I saw a big difference between DA scores on Moz Chrome app VS Website Tool. Which DA score is the correct one? I personally believe the scores on Moz's site is most accurate. Do you happen to have issues syncing the scored to your Chrome app? Chrome App VS. Moz Research Tool (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/)
Moz Bar | | iPrice_Marketing
Moz.com: 92 / 88 Here's a screenshot of the difference: https://ipricegroup-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jeremy_chew/ESy9lzUTC3lOl8o93Sx6LsUB8mYXo8LmYuUj2aa0xLXi1A?e=A6OrXs This was evident in other websites too:
Priceza (priceza.com.my😞 38 / 24
Shopback (shopback.my😞 43 / 41
Cuponation (https://www.cuponation.com.my/😞 27 / 250 -
Duplicate Page Titles detected, no relevant links shown
Moz is reporting duplicate page titles, but the relevant pages aren't being shown. The downloaded report doesn't show them either. Screencast: http://screencast.com/t/gkyRds6u
Moz Bar | | ElykInnovation0 -
Moz Crawl Showing Duplicate Content But It's Not?!
Unfortunately I can't give out the URL, but here's the deal... I have two URL's which have completely different content on them but are being crawled as duplicate content. Any Idea how that would happen? I'm not seeing any errors in WMT's. Has anyone seen this before? Is the duplicate content reporting based on a % of the page content matching as the same?
Moz Bar | | Swarm-SEO0 -
Duplicate content reported for totally different pages
Hi, The Moz report is showing just over 21,500 duplicate page issues on our site. This is more or less every page we have. However when I look at the pages it says are duplicates they are totally different (it could for example report that a news page for 2009 is the same as a product page just added which has no relation when you read the content or view the page). What sort of thing could it be picking up as duplicate content? I assume it must be something in the HTML for the site rather than the actual page content as there is no cross over at all on the pages highlighted. The only issue I can currently identify is that the menu for the mobile version of the site has a huge number of internal links which I will cut down. If the tools purely look at HTML content this could be seen as duplicate but shouldn't it be clever enough to realise what is content and what is site structure? Thanks,
Moz Bar | | TW-Steve0 -
Can you track amount of visitors to competitive websites/blogs?
We are trying to understand our website traffic, specifically our blog, compared to our competitors. Can we use Moz to understand actual visitor metrics against competitive domains?
Moz Bar | | AppNeta0 -
Site Wide Content Analysis
Are there tools that can effectively analyze your content site wide and provide recommendations?
Moz Bar | | SpadaMan0 -
Moz Dupe content crawl anomaly
Hi Moz has completed a crawl for a site i'm working on which also has a development area (hence with lots of dupe content) on a sub domain (and this dev area hasn't been hidden from crawlers via password, robots, gwt etc etc). Moz dupe content report is not showing any of these urls though even though my campaign setting is on 'root' domain so i would have thought report should be listing the subdomain urls as dupe content (because they are dupe content). Any ideas ? Cheers Dan
Moz Bar | | Dan-Lawrence0