Duplicate Content/Similar Pages
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Hello,
I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
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Thank you. I think the issue is the lifts are identical except for the capacity, so it's difficult other that differentiating in the title, url & headers that one is 18,000 and the other is 12,000. I'm thinking that combing them on one page might be the best option.
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Thank you for the response. That is kind of the logic I was thinking.
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I've had similar issues working for clients. In my experience, breaking these out into two separate pages can be beneficial if people are actually searching for lifts based on capacity, for the generic terms related to the lift it can be problematic. Essentially, if you have two pages about "mobile xyz lift", you are going to be cannibalizing to some degree. I'd strongly recommend making one page that talked about both with sub-headers for each.
If you do what your boss wants, you might have two pages ranking closely together in search while hurting the ability of one page to prosper to a higher degree. I don't have any hard data to support this, but I've experienced it anecdotally several times. In your case, the topic is too similar.
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