Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
To use the same content just changing the keywords could be seen as duplicate content?
-
I want to offer the same service or product in many different cities, so instead of creating a new content for each city what I want to do it to copy the content already created for the product and service of a city and then change the name of the city and create a new url inside my website for each city.
for example let say I sell handmade rings in the USA, but I want o target each principal city in the USA, so I have want to have a unque url for ecxh city so for example for
Miami I want to have www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-miami
and for LA the url would be www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-la
Can I have the same content talking about the handmade rings and just change the keywords and key phrases? or this will count as a duplicate content?
content:
TITLE: Miami Handmade Rings
URL :www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-miami
Shop Now handmade rings in Miami in our online store and get a special discount in Miami purchases over $50 and also get free shipping on Miami Local address...
See what our Miami handmade rings clients say about our products....
TITLE: LA Handmade Rings
URL: www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-la
Shop Now handmade rings in LA in our online store and get a special discount in LA purchases over $50 and also get free shipping on LA Local address...
See what our LA handmade rings clients say about our products....
There are more than 100 location in the country I want to do this, so that is why I want to copy paste and replace..
Thanks in advance,
David Orion
-
This used to work superbly until about 2003. Then google was able to identify these sites and would drop all of the pages except one or two.
Cookie cutter pages are no longer useful.
-
Check out articles on the Panda update recently to see a lot about this topic.
I especially like this one from Vanessa Fox
The gist of it is that Google has started to devalue sites with lots of "cloned" pages where the content is very similar from page to page, but the area info, or keyword swaps out.
This is based on the idea that content that is tailored to a page's topic is more useful to the user, and it is more likely to carry nuances than broader content.
So for example I can talk about hotels in Dallas, or New York the same exact way "See Dallas/New York Hotels downtown and be close to all of the hip restaurants and activities"
Or I could go with something more Dallas Specific "See our Downtown Dallas Hotels near the American Airlines center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and direct access to the DART Trains"
The second example is WAY more useful to the user, and so Google's latest updates will tend to favor that over generic topical text.
So if you can afford to get copywriting for each topic I would.
If you can't then I would start picking out the biggest value terms and build content specific to that, use generic content for the other terms for now, but slowly replace those over time as well with more valuable content.
You may be in a situation where there isn't more valuable specific content to outrank you right now so the generic content will do decently in the rankings. In this case you may not see such a horrible ranking, but when someone eventually competes with you and catches on to your scheme it will be better to have the unique content already working for you.
Just my 2 cents
-
Yes, this will be seen as duplicate content. There's no "easy" way to create unique content for each locale. The best you can do is have a general outline and outsource the content creation to a high quality writer (or sit down and start writing yourself). Article spinning or cheap writers will lead to low quality articles that will be difficult to get to rank well.
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
-
Huge difference between GSC ranking and browser ranking for certain keywords: How to proceed?
Hi, There is a huge ranking difference between the GSC and browser for our primary keyword. As per GSC, our ranking is around 15 and when checking on the multiple different incognito browsers it's around 50. How to handle this? Which is the accurate one? Product expert from Google forums claim that what I see on browsers are the personalized results; but I tried on different browsers with different connections. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Using Google to find a discontinued product.
Hi Guys. I mostly use this forum for business questions, but now it's a personal one! I'm trying to find a supplier that might still have discontinued product. It's the Behritone C5A speaker monitor. All my searches bring up a plethora of pages that appear to sell the product... but they have no stock. (Wouldn't removing these pages make for a better internet?) No 2nd hand ones on eBay 😞 Do you have any suggestion about how I can get more relevant results... i.e find supplier that might still have stock? Any tips or trick I may be able to use to help me with this? Many thanks in advance to an awesome community 🙂 Isaac.
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6631 -
When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords?
Hey guys I have a few questions. I am pretty sure that I was penalized by Panda a few years back because I went very heavy on bold, italic and underlining my keywords. Since then I removed the bold, italic and underlines and never have used them again. I was just reading an article on the Moz Blog and I saw some bold words. My questions are, When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords? Any help would be great! Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | Videogamefan1 -
Special Characters in Keywords
Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same? Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word. Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2220 -
How to Change Geo Target Location of Country Specific Domain
Hi - I have a country specific domain (www.updater.in), used it for writing blog articles Now when i go to site settings in Webmaster - the Geo target by default is coming for India, and no option of changing geographic target. Is there any way to let Search Engines know (despite .in domain) that site Geo Location is not country specific, but is meant for users from all across !!
Algorithm Updates | | Modi0 -
Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice
Greetings, Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started to become a little clearer. So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result. We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy. I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around. Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days. Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword. So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ? Warmest regards, Michael S&M Warning: adult site, NSFW
Algorithm Updates | | Sexandmetal0 -
"Revisit-after" Metatag = Why use it?
Hi Mozfans, Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them; name="revisit-after" content="7 days" /> I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag? Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible? Thanks in advance everyone! Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshSEO20110 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1