To what extent is content considered unique or duplicate?
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I work primarily on classifieds websites and an issue I consistently come across are two or more URLs which have the exact same ad count, due to site structure and the way everything is categorized. An example of such would be with these two pages:
https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/motorboats/princess https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/boats-for-sale/princess/power
These two have the exact same number of ads- would search engines mark these as duplicate content? Both have different meta descriptions, title tags etc. but essentially the MC is exactly the same.
If they are, what would be the best course to remedy the problem? I'm skeptical about using canonical tags as I generally use them for exact duplicate pages.
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All of the text should be totally unique, for example it should be manually written by our highly experienced copywriter who knows about the product or services they are writing about. This is why we only employ highly experienced copywriters at our web design business
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If they are exactly the same listings in exactly the same order then yes, you probably don't need both of those URLs. I'd go back to the architecture and try and work out why so many duplicate URLs were created, what the logic on that is, fix it from the foundation. Messing around with tags that Google ignore half the time is seldom the answer. It 'seems' simple, but in reality doesn't usually properly fix the main issues. Canonical tags for example, do not consolidate backlink authority properly. 301s are an option but then it's like, why have I created a whole shadow section that just 301s to another section? By that point you begin to realise the ridiculousness of the structure and think about fixing it properly
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