Any experience regarding what % is considered duplicate?
-
Some sites (including 1 or two I work with) have a legitimate reason to have duplicate content, such as product descriptions. One way to deal with duplicate content is to add other unique content to the page.
It would be helpful to have guidelines regarding what percentage of the content on a page should be unique. For example, if you have a page with 1,000 words of duplicate content, how many words of unique content should you add for the page to be considered OK?
I realize that a) Google will never reveal this and b) it probably varies a fair bit based on the particular website. However...
Does anyone have any experience in this area?
(Example: You added 300 words of unique content to all 250 pages on your site, that each had 100 words of duplicate content before, and that worked to improve your rankings.)
Any input would be appreciated!
Note: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about "spinning" duplicate content to make it "unique". I am talking about adding unique content to a page that has legitimate duplicate content.
-
Check out this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dealing-with-duplicate-content
It will give you a much more thorough answer than just a percentage of uniqueness. But if you want that kind of answer I mostly hear guesses between 20% - 40% unique content.
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
WordPress Duplicate URLs?
On my site, there are two different category bases leading to the exact same page. My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress, and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true? Here's an example of the correct url. and... Here's an example of the same exact content, but using a different url. Notice that one is coming from /topics and the other is coming from /authors base. My understanding is that this is bad. Am I wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonMOZ1 -
Will merging sites create a duplicate content penalty?
I have 2 sites that would be better suited being merged and creating a more authoritative site. Basically I'de like to merge site A in to site B. If I add new pages from site A to Site B and create 301 redirects for those pages on site A to the new pages on Site B is that the best way to go about it? As the pages are already indexed would this create any duplicate content issue or would the redirect solve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boballanjones0 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by blog
Hey I've done some research and understand the canonical tags and rel prev and rel next, but I wanted to get someones opinion on if we needed it since the articles are somewhat independent of each in content (there's a focus on both banks and accountants) We have over 68 pages of blog materials http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=7 through http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=68 Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
What is Considered Over-Optimization?
Apart from keyword stuffing, what is considered by Google as over-optimization? For instance, if I link from a subdomain to a page on my main domain with a keyword-rich anchor text, does it qualify as over-optimization?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Duplicate Content and Titles
Hi Mozzers, I saw a considerable amount of duplicate content and page titles on our clients website. We are just implementing a fix in the CMS to make sure that these are all fixed. What changes do you think I could see in terms of rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
What would you consider an over optimized title tag? [examples included]
Say you want to target a single page for 2 terms and they both get a good amount of search volume. At the same time you don't want the title tag to be atrocious, do you just choose one? (maybe the one with most search volume). I'm going to make up some examples which aren't based on real search volume for the sake of time and completely fake and you be the judge: custom car parts - exact sv: 4000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule
personalized car parts - exact sv: 5000
wholesale custom car parts - exact sv: 4400 Title tag A: Custom Car Parts - Personalized Wholesale Car Parts | Company Name OR Title Tag B: Custom Car Parts | Company Name Or You recommend. Do you get where i am going here? Some of the pages on my website target 3-4 terms that mean exactly or pretty close to the same thing.0
