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
-
Can 'Jump link'/'Anchor tag' urls rank in Google for keywords?
E.g. www.website.com/page/#keyword-anchor-text Where the part after the # is a section of the page you can jump to, and the title of that section is a secondary keyword you want the page to rank for?
Algorithm Updates | | rwat0 -
Using Brand value for SEO: Can we use keyword with brand name?
Hi Moz community, I am curious to know this. Let's say there is a brand value for a company. It has it's own popularity that it's been mentioned across the internet and social media directly with brand name without their service or industry keyword. Now if the company started promoting themselves like keyword along with their brand name, will it help them to rank for that keyword. For example, Moz is already famous, now they want to rank for "SEO" and related keywords, so they started calling themselves on internet "Moz SEO"; will this fetch them in ranking for keyword SEO? My ultimate question is, using primary keyword along with brand name will work out in ranking for that primary keyword or not? 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 -
Has anyone used Capterra and will I get penalized for paid links?
Hello - I'm contemplating buying a directory listing on the software promotion website http://www.capterra.com/ . It's a site that gets quite a bit of traffic for people searching for software products and I was interested in promoting my software product there, but I don't want to ruin our very good standing with Google at this time if Google deems Capterra as selling paid links. I'm not interested in this for links but instead as a good source of referral traffic for my software site. If anyone has used Capterra or has advice on whether Capterra might injure my SERP rankings, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Jeff
Algorithm Updates | | DenverDude0070 -
Does omitted results shown by Google always mean that website has duplicate content?
Google search results for a particular query was appearing in top 10 results but now the page appears but only after clicking on the " omitted results by google." My website lists different businesses in a particular locality and sometimes results for different localities are same because we show results from nearby area if number of businesses in that locality (search by users) are less then 15. Will this be considered as "duplicate content"? If yes then what steps can be taken to resolve this issue?
Algorithm Updates | | prsntsnh0 -
Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on. I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends. Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
Algorithm Updates | | Manseo
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think, will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?0 -
Troubleshooting Decline of Branded Keyword Searches
Hi, Over the past year, I have seen a huge change in the distribution of our organic keyword traffic. I'm trying to research why our branded keywords have gone down. Google analytics only shows me impressions for the past three months. Does anyone have ideas on how to explain this change in traffic? Please see the attached chart. Thanks! branded-v-nonbranded-organic-search.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | netdiva_amy0 -
Rankings changing every couple of MINUTES in Google?
We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?
Algorithm Updates | | d4online0