Is this Duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
This is now popping up in Moz after using this for over 6 months.
It is saying this is now duplicate site content.What do we think? Is this a bad strategy, it works well on the SERPS but could be damaging the root domain page ranking? I guess this is a little shady.
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-crowborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-desborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-didcot/
Thanks.
-
If what you've got right now is working for you and bringing in relevant (converting) traffic then I would be cautious about doing anything too drastic. There's always a risk associated with any changes you make like this and the last thing you want to do is kill your own traffic.
I wouldn't immediately tear down the duplicate pages, but I would start to think about how I could update some of the content and maybe create new pages that better engage with your visitors and help to increase your conversion rate (I don't know what your conversion rate is.). That may help off set any impact cause by a potential loss of rankings for those duplicate pages might.If the pages continue to rank then it'll still help!
I've got some thoughts that might be useful (please take this as constructive criticism and recognise that I don't know your niche as well as you do!)
For example, the copy on your home page is "all about you" and very little about what your visitor. What do I get if I book you for an event? What's your value proposition, the benefits of your particular service and how can you differentiate yourself from the competition.
A great place to start is to speak to your last 10 customers and find out why they hired you, what were the things that convinced them to hire you, what were the concerns/doubts they the had?
I'm guessing here (you'll need to talk to your real customers) but if I was hiring you for my wedding, I wouldn't be so worried about the price, or the quality of your routines (I don't know what ground-breaking magic is!) but more concerned with questions like:
- "What if it's all going to be a bit cheesy?"
- Is this going to annoy my guests?
- Is it going to be intrusive?
- Can he work with the venue?
- Can the performance be tailored to the theme of my event or the location?
If you can figure our what really matters to people you can quickly put them at ease and even turn these concerns into benefits.
You might want to also look at how you're using images. It can be hard on the ego, but it's not you that's the important thing here - if you can show more of the reactions and atmosphere that you create then that may help people fell that "yes, I want some of that for my wedding/party etc"
Don't bury your testimonials away on a testimonials page. You've got some great comments there about "delighting guests", "making birthdays special"... I'd use those on your relevant pages. (Personally I think they're more compelling than the "celeb" testimonials.)
Segment your customers and work that group's particular needs/concerns. I'm sure you know the kind of specific issues that come up when your dealing with corporate customers.
I really do think it would help to write the content in the first person, using as natural language as possible. As it stand, the site comes across a bit cold, and doesn't let your personality come across.
Hope this helps.
-
Doug,
Thank you for your response, it solidifys what I have been thinking for the last few months about removing the keyword optimisation on site.
Yes, I do get a lot of work from those pages, and they do seem to convert fairly well. I guess I need to change the title of the website and the copy for human eyes, not google's.
The only fear there is that I drop out of rankings. I guess that is the price to pay if you want to play by the rules!
With regards to the duplicate pages, what should I do then, everyone in my niche is doing it, shall I get rid of them all and bite the bullet!?
-
Nice!
Tom, out of interest, do these pages get much search traffic? What is the conversion rate like on these - do they actually get your any work. If you're not getting any traffic/conversions then just showing up in the SERPS for your keyword is just vanity thing.
If the tactic is getting you work then you obviously don't want to tear it all down, although I'm sure you understand that it's not exactly the kind of thing Google's terms of service are trying to encourage. These kind of tactics are still working, but there's a risk attached too and it's not something I would recommend and not something I'd feel comfortable recommending.
You've got to look at your competition too - and I see that it's a pretty common (almost ubiquitous) tactic used in your niche.
Do you detail the area your cover on your home page? I'm worried that seeing "Magician London" at the start of your page title and the keywords "Magician London" all over the copy could put people off looking for something local.
How can people find out if you cover their area when they visit your site?
The page copy doesn't read very naturally! Have you tried reading it out-loud? I'm, not sure you'd talk to someone like this face to face. I would try to make the text more natural and use the first person. After all, you're trying to sell yourself aren't you, and it's your personality, that's makes you different from your competition.
My general advice would to think less about optimising for search engines, and start thinking about optimising your your visitors, what information are they looking for and what are they trying to achieve on your site...
-
Hi there, this is definitely not a good idea from an SEO stand point. I strongly recommend to you to have the content written uniquely for each of those pages. I have seen methods like these making websites vanish from the index as well as making websites safely pass under the Google's radar. But, we should stick to the best practices and see to it that all the pages on our websites have substantially unique content so as to find and secure their place into the SERPs. Quality content that is unique, fresh, highly relevant, interesting, link and share worthy can literally spell magic for your SEO efforts. Just my two cents my friend.
Best of luck to you,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Help finding website content scraping
Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site. But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain. That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check. But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages. So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy. Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Technical : Duplicate content and domain name change
Hi guys, So, this is a tricky one. My server team just made quite a big mistake :We are a big We are a big magento ecommerce website, selling well, with about 6000 products. And we are about to change our domaine name for administrative reasons. Let's call the current site : current.com and the future one : future.com Right, here is the issue Connecting to the search console, I saw future.com sending 11.000 links to current.com. At the same time DA was hit by 7 points. I realized future.com was uncorrectly redirected and showed a duplicated site or current.com. We corrected this, and future.com now shows a landing page until we make the domain name change. I was wondering what is the best way to avoid the penalty now and what can be the consequences when changing domain name. Should I set an alias on search console or something ? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kepass0 -
Duplicate product content - from a manufacturer website, to retailers
Hi Mozzers, We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website. How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site? Thanks!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | A_Q0 -
Is Syndicated (Duplicate) Content considered Fresh Content?
Hi all, I've been asking quite a bit of questions lately and sincerely appreciate your feedback. My co-workers & I have been discussing content as an avenue outside of SEO. There is a lot of syndicated content programs/plugins out there (in a lot of cases duplicate) - would this be considered fresh content on an individual domain? An example may clearly show what I'm after: domain1.com is a lawyer in Seattle.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby
domain2.com is a lawyer in New York. Both need content on their website relating to being a lawyer for Google to understand what the domain is about. Fresh content is also a factor within Google's algorithm (source: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor). Therefore, fresh content is needed on their domain. But what if that content is duplicate, does it still hold the same value? Question: Is fresh content (adding new / updating existing content) still considered "fresh" even if it's duplicate (across multiple domains). Purpose: domain1.com may benefit from a resource for his/her local clientale as the same would domain2.com. And both customers would be reading the "duplicate content" for the first time. Therefore, both lawyers will be seen as an authority & improve their website to rank well. We weren't interested in ranking the individual article and are aware of canonical URLs. We aren't implementing this as a strategy - just as a means to really understand content marketing outside of SEO. Conclusion: IF duplicate content is still considered fresh content on an individual domain, then couldn't duplicate content (that obviously won't rank) still help SEO across a domain? This may sound controversial & I desire an open-ended discussion with linked sources / case studies. This conversation may tie into another Q&A I posted: http://moz.com/community/q/does-duplicate-content-actually-penalize-a-domain. TLDR version: Is duplicate content (same article across multiple domains) considered fresh content on an individual domain? Thanks so much, Cole0 -
Publishing the same article content on Yahoo? Worth It? Penalties? Urgent
Hey All, I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions. Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | moneywise_test0 -
Content within a toggle, Juice or No Juice?
Greetings Mozzers, I recently added a significant amount of information within a single page utilizing toggles to hide the content from a user and for them to see it they must click to reveal. Since technically the code is reading "display:none" to start, would that be considered "Black Hat" or "Not There" to crawlers? It isn't displayed in any sort of spammy way. It is more for the UX of the visitor that toggles were utilized. Thoughts and advice is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Content ideas?
We run a printing company and we are struggling to come up with unique content people will actually want to know, is there any way of getting the ball rolling? We were thinking of ideas such as exhibition guide but this seems to have been overdone. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0