Duplicate content question

[AndyKubrin]

Hey Mozzers!

I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit.

I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer.

I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue:

• Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose.

• Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right.

• Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site).

Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case?

Thanks in advance for your help.

AK

[AndyKubrin]

@seoelevated Thanks. I see your reasoning. It's also valid.

[seoelevated]

@andykubrin I would like to add that another valid approach is to ignore the "issue". Are all 4 of your form pages currently indexed? If so, then this Moz-reported issue is not necessarily an actual issue. There is no "penalty" for duplicate content like this. The situation we all wish to avoid is for the search engine to choose one of the pages to index, because it sees them all as duplicates, and not necessarily index the one we want or associate with all our desired keywords we've individually targeted per page. But, if all 4 of your pages are currently indexed, and if they rank for the terms that you want, then it would be OK to ignore the issue.

As well, you might think about whether you want these pages to be indexed/rank at all. If your desire is for traffic to go to the service description pages and then flow to the forms, and if the service description pages are the ones which actually are ranking, the issue may not even matter to you. And so again, you might decide to ignore. And that would be a valid choice.

[AndyKubrin]

Hi @nigel_carr ,

You've pointed the way to a solution.

I offer four services. I have a service description page for each one, with around 300 words on each page and a link to a separate HubSpot form. I use four separate HubSpot forms because that arrangement allows me to tailor the automated responses I send to each person who requests more information on a given service.

So I think the two best options for a solution are:

• Keep the service descriptions and forms separate, but noindex each individual form

• Incorporate the forms into the service description pages

The first option provides a neater appearance, but the second option would shorten the visitor's path to the form, so that's probably the better option.

Thank you for your advice.

Regards,

Andy

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Andy

The reason why they are coming up with a duplicate content warning is likely because there is very little content on the pages other than the forms.

You have a couple of options:

1. Flesh out the content on the pages so that the subject is clearly defined in each case. This would involve writing 300+ words/adding an image+alt/H1/Meta etc on the subjects of:

Content Marketing Consultation
Copywriting Consultation

• The other two

2. If you can't write unique content for each form because the subjects are too close (Copyright vs Content) then it begs the question why you have the 4 forms in the first place.

If you want to keep the 4 forms then can canonicalize 3 of them to the main one, so only 1 is set to rank.

Note: If you do canonicalize it is not guaranteed that Google won't feature either one or all the other forms. You are simply telling Google that that is your preference.

3. You could noindex three of the four forms which would be a perfectly acceptable solution even though most scanning software will warn you of the no indexes.

I hope that helps

Nigel