Forget Duplicate Content, What to do With Very Similar Content?
-
All,
I operate a Wordpress blog site that focuses on one specific area of the law. Our contributors are attorneys from across the country who write about our niche topic. I've done away with syndicated posts, but we still have numerous articles addressing many of the same issues/topics. In some cases 15 posts might address the same issue. The content isn't duplicate but it is very similar, outlining the same rules of law etc.
I've had an SEO I trust tell me I should 301 some of the similar posts to one authoritative post on the subject. Is this a good idea? Would I be better served implementing canonical tags pointing to the "best of breed" on each subject?
Or would I be better off being grateful that I receive original content on my niche topic and not doing anything?
Would really appreciate some feedback.
John
-
If all 15 comments are written by 15 different people the content would clearly be unique...and you are fortunate to have that sort of engagement. Perhaps you could create a page where you link all the answers in one place..maybe sort out the answers..
You have probably already seen this this http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Good luck.
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
-
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Content Duplication - Zencart
Hi Guys !!! Based on crawler results, it shows that I have 188 duplicate content pages, out of which some are those in which I am not able to understand where the duplication is ??? The page created is unique. All the URL's are static, all titles, metat tags are unique. How do I remove this duplication !!! I am using Zencart as a platform. Thanks in advance for the help !!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | sidjain4you0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
URL query considered duplicate content?
I have a Magento site. In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate. Note the article was written in 2007.
Technical SEO | | BlazeSunglass0 -
Rel=canonical for similar (not exact) content?
Hi all, We have a software product and SEOMOZ tools are currently reporting duplicate content issues in the support section of the website. This is because we keep several versions of our documentation covering the current version and previous 3-4 versions as well. There is a fair amount of overlap in the documentation. When a new version comes out, we simply copy the documentation over, edit it as necessary to address changes and create new pages for the new functionality. This means there is probably an 80% or so overlap from one version to the next. We were previously blocking Google (using robots.txt) from accessing previous versions of the sofware documentation, but this is obviously not ideal from an SEO perspective. We're in the process of linking up all the old versions of the documenation to the newest version so we can use rel=canonical to point to the current version. However, the content isn't all exact duplicates. Will we be penalized by Google because we're using rel=canonical on pages that aren't actually exact duplicates? Thanks, Darren.
Technical SEO | | dgibbons0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
How to resolve this Duplicate content?
Hi , There is page i get when i do proper menu navigation Caratlane.com>jewellery>rings>casualsrings> http://www.caratlane.com/jewellery/rings/casual-rings/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html When i do a site search in my search box by my product code number "JR00219" The same page is appears with different url http://www.caratlane.com/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html So there is a duplicate content. How can we resolve it. Regards, kathir caratlane.com
Technical SEO | | kathiravan0 -
Duplicate content
I have to sentences that I want to optimize to different pages for. sentence number one is travel to ibiza by boat sentence number to is travel to ibiza by ferry My question is, can I have the same content on both pages exept for the keywords or will Google treat that as duplicate content and punish me? And If yes, where goes the limit/border for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | stlastla0