Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would absolutely recommend canonical in this case, and I'm afraid you're working on a bit of a misconception about indexed pages and the effects of duplicate content.

When a user searches Google, Google tries to serve them the most relevant, useful pages and resources based on their perceived intent. If multiple pages on your site appear to potentially fit the needs of the searcher, then Google is likely to do 1 of 2 things—rank one of the pages (potentially the wrong one), or determine that the appropriate page isn't clear and skip your site entirely. What canonical does is let Google know what you consider the appropriate result.

Having these duplicates is likely to do the opposite of what you're expecting. More pages indexed ≠ greater visibility.

Honestly, maybe both? For me, it would depend on how useful those old posts are. Are they getting traffic? Are there valuable links pointing to them? If so, it may be worth it. If not, 301 redirect them to new, relevant, optimized posts.

For what it's worth, I also wouldn't recommend "churning out" blog posts unless they add value for your visitors.

Hi bmayer09,

How's this going? Any luck with Luke's suggestion?

Hi poke1! If Gaston's replies helped, mind marking one or more as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him some bonus MozPoints, and it's helpful for us.

Otherwise, how can we be of more help?

Hi there,

While I agree with Logan that hreflang may actually be your best bet, in response to those specific questions:

• Cross-domain canonicals are not inherently problematic.

• By my understanding, at least, you're free to use rel="canonical" whenever you deem appropriate.

Hi Daniel,

It's tough to recommend someone outside of our list of recommended companies, but BuiltVisible's Guide to Baidu SEO is a great place to start learning. I've heard good things about the Webcertain blog, too.

Hi SneakerFiles! Any progress on this? We'd love an update!

Hi there,

Just wondering, what do you mean that you'll get penalized for any off-page work? If you earn quality links, I can't imagine they'd be an issue.

If you're not trying to rank, then you may not need to prioritize fixing this.

Duplicate content isn't a penalty; it's a risk. The risk is that more than one page on your site will seem appropriate in response to a particular search query and Google might 1) rank the wrong one, or 2) "decide" it's not clear and rank neither. If these aren't pages you'd expect or want to show up in search results anyway, then you can feel free simply to put together a page that'll provide the best experience for the user.

Hi Steve! I'm not positive what Google considers duplicate, but I can tell you that our tools flag pages as duplicate when ≥90% of the source code (including content) matches. It's likely that we're more sensitive to it than Google is, which is intentional.

Out of curiosity, are you trying to rank both of these pages?

Hi everyone,

I'm very, very pleased to announce that the latest Mozscape index has been released five days ahead of schedule, and it's back up to the quality you expect from Moz!

It's no secret that we've struggled this year with our index. I can't overstate how much we appreciate everyone sticking with us—we know how hard this has been. The good news—well, apart from the early release—is that we've worked out the issue, and we expect to finally be back on track moving forward.

Director of Engineering Martin York has shared a post to the Moz blog explaining just what's been going so wrong, and outlining our plan for the future. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for being such an incredible community.

As for the folks who are seeing Domain Authority and Page Authority drops since the index release, please see Rand's recent post for more.

Hi there! It's definitely something we're aware folks want, and it's on our radar for the future. There's no official ETA yet, though.

In the meantime, there are some workarounds and tools that may help.

1. If you're not using all of your available campaigns, try adding a second campaign for the same site, and add up to 3 different competitors there (OP alluded to this).

2. Some of the research tools—specifically, Open Site Explorer and Rank Tracker—can help you get data on more competitors. The only issue is that they won't automatically update each week as your campaigns do, so you'll need to go in to pull more data when you need it.

   In OSE, Competitive Link Metrics lets you compare the page-, subdomain-, and domain-level metrics of up to 5 sites at a time (the one you initially searched for and four more).

   Rank Tracker allows you to pull ranking information on-demand for any site.

You may also appreciate the competitive insights you can get from the Keyword Difficulty tool and its Full SERP Analysis Report. Cyrus Shepard does a great job of covering how that works in this video.

I hope that helps hold you over a bit!

Don, this is SUPER cool. I'm pinning it to the top of the forum.

My friend, there likely is no answer to this issue, and the responses you've received pretty well cover the possibilities. They've come from folks known to be experts, as well. To get more specific would require testing against the site in question, and for that you'll need to hire a consultant.

Please be courteous and respect the community members who have generously given of their time and knowledge to answer your question.

If you have questions about our community etiquette guidelines or thoughts you'd like to share, please email us at community@moz.com.

Hi everyone!

This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says:

"What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community.

When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience."

It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?

Hi there, Moz Community!

It's Thanksgiving here in the US, and this year I'm thankful for the release of Moz Content. With that in mind, I'd like to revisit Kelsey Libert's November 5 Moz Blog post on creating and distributing content to kick of a community discussion to hold us over during this long weekend. Kelsey said:

"Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers."

What do you think? How much effort do you put into getting your content distributed? Do you have particular strategies for creating your content? What are they?

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a wonderful week! This week's discussion question comes from Tuesday's (December blog post by John-Henry Scherck, The Step-by-Step Guide to Turning Link Prospectors into Lead Generators. From the post:

"Digital marketing is a pretty introverted industry. This tends to make us a bit hesitant to embrace sales and outbound selling. There’s no beating around the bush: Sales can be difficult, scary, uncomfortable, and awkward — but if you want to grow your client base, it may require getting out of your comfort zone."

John-Henry shows us the opportunity for people who are good at link prospecting to apply those skills to lead generation, improving business opportunities by creatively using the skills they already have. SEOs and marketers wear many hats, and have a diverse skill set at their disposal—how else can we apply the skills we already have in creative ways?

In today's Daily SEO Fix, Tori dives into using Open Site Explorer to find opportunities—particularly potential keyword ranking opportunities—in your links' anchor text. Watch "How to Use Open Site Explorer to Check Your Anchor Text" to get started!

The Daily SEO Fix is an ongoing series of Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to check out the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube!

Hi there, Moz Community!

In Tuesday's post on the Moz Blog, "Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages," Miriam Ellis asks:

When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a _fear of local landing pages. _

Which brings me to today's question!

What are the toughest challenges you've faced when creating local landing pages? How have you overcome them? What successes have you had, and what lessons have you learned along the way?

Hi there, friends!

This week's discussion comes from today's Whiteboard Friday:

Rand's outlined SEO practices that are outdated and no longer effective. Did anything catch you off-guard, making you want to pivot your strategy? Anything that you disagree with, or that you feel still works well regardless? What other tactics, in your experience, no longer work?