Sub-category considered duplicate content?
-
Hello,
My craw diagnostics from the PRO account is telling me that the following two links have duplicate content and duplicate title tag:
-
http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases (New Blu-ray Releases)
-
http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases/action-adventure (New Action & Adventure Releases | Blu-ray)
I am really new to the SEO world so I am stuck trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. My question is how should I fix this issue.
I guess I can put canonical tag on all sub-categories but I was worried that search engines would not craw the sub-categories and index potentially valuable pages.
Thanks for all the help.
-
-
Thank you very much for your thorough thoughts, explanation, and your answer to my problem.
Just want to put my thoughts into words here so maybe this conversation can help others that are in the same shoes. The answer to the one question that you've raised, “do users benefit from your site?”, is an idea that I'm trying to prove. You are correct, the site does not provide real unique content except trying to improve user experience to help explore recent product releases on Amazon.com.
This is a niche product because most people are interested in the popular releases and not interested in browsing hundreds of releases (popular or not) by their release date but I believe there are enthusiasts that may benefit from this site. I want to benefit the people that are not just looking for the popular releases. But again, this is yet to be proven.
Thanks for sharing some great ideas to help improve my site. I will keep the review and user generated content concept in mind.
-
The challenge you face is your site does not provide any content. It seems you are an affiliate site for Amazon.com.
The question is, do users benefit from your site? When a user enters a search term in Google, are they ever better off for having found your site? Or would users be better off going directly to amazon?
I am not criticizing your site personally, but sharing google's view. If you offered a good, independent review of each movie, that is great. If you encourage users to generate content by asking their opinions, that is another positive way to go. But to simply link to thousands of movies on another site is not offering value to users or the internet.
The first step is answering the question...what does my site offer users? Why would users feel fortunate to have found my site? Once you have that answer, build upon it.
For your category page problem, you have two options. You can add the "noindex, follow" meta tag to the page. This tag tells search engines that you are not providing unique content and the pages should not be indexed.
Another option is to add unique content to the category pages. For your Action and Adventure page you can describe what movies are part of that genre. "Action and Adventure category includes movies ranging from Die Hard to Indiana Jones. Any fast-paced, heart pumping action movie fits well into this category....." Your content should be at least a few hundred words, something you wrote yourself, and something users might find helpful.
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
-
Tracking links and duplicate content
Hi all, I have a bit of a conundrum for you all pertaining to a tracking link issue I have run into on a clients site. They currently have over duplicate content. Currently, they have over 15,000 pages being crawled (using Screaming Frog) but only 7,000+ are legitimate pages in the sense of they are not duplicates of themselves. The client is using Omniture instead of Google Analytics and using an advanced tracking system on their site for internal and external links (ictids and ectids) in the URL parameters. This is creating thousands of duplicated pages being crawled by Google (as seen on their Search Console and on Screaming Frog). They also are in the middle of moving over from http to https and have thousands of pages currently set up for both, again, creating a duplicate content issue. What I have suggested for the tracking links is setting up a URL parameter in Search Console for these tracking links. I've also suggested they canonical all tracking links to point to the clean page so the pages that have already been indexed point to the correct clean url. Does this seam like the appropriate strategy? Additionally, I've told them before they submit a new sitemap to Google, they need to switch their website over to https to avoid worsening their duplicate content issue. They have not submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console since March 2015. Thank you for any help you can offer!
Reporting & Analytics | | Rydch410 -
Backlinks or content? What is the problem here?
My Moz ranking is 29, Ahrefs Domain rank is 49 and Majestic Citation flow is 44 whereas trust flow is 17. This is a plain question - If the above are the rankings for backlink problem, then where is the problem more likely to be found? Backlink or content? In more detail - My site has been dropping in search since the last few weeks. With these rankings, is it likely that a backlink related problem is there? I myself agree that some content is poor and thin and there is a problem of plagiarism also. But overall, do i keep focusing on content? I do not know how good are these rankings as shown above. My URL is www.marketing91.com Please let me know whether the backlink profile looks good or not? So that at least i am not worried that there is a backlink problem as well. (i will surely work on toxic links soon) I can worry only on content.
Reporting & Analytics | | marketing910 -
How often does google content experiments stats update?
From my experience it seems to update once per day (every 24 hours), can anyone confirm this is the case or have a link to an official announcement which confirms how often the data updates? It would be handy to know when it updates so we can see the latest information as it comes in.
Reporting & Analytics | | Twist3600 -
Will the analytics offer me the same content review power as Hootsuite or Twitonomy?
Will the analytics offer me the same content review power as Hootsuite or Twitonomy? I need to know if I should get one of these tools in addition to this. I need information weekly about retweets, mentions, most popular content, reach, etc.,? I would like to be able to do this all from one place- here in Moz.
Reporting & Analytics | | Isaac55890 -
Google analytcics sub domain dot or not?
Buongiorno from 16 degrees C wetherby UK famous for the Wetherby Whaler Chippy 😉 OK... on this site http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ I've set up sub domain tracking as so:
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Parent site:
http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ Sub domain
http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/ So my question is please: should a dot be placed in the sub domain line as in : _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.philpotts.co.uk']); Some advice places a dot in setDomainName other advice doesnt 😞
Any insights welcome, Grazie,David0 -
Duplicate page content
I'm seeing duplicate page content for tagged URLs. For example:
Reporting & Analytics | | DolbySEO
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html?onlnk=al-sc as well as PPC campaigns. We tag certain landing pages purposefully in order to understand that traffic comes from these pages, since we use Google Analytics and don't have the abiility to see clickpaths in the package we have. Is there a way to set parameters for crawling to exclude certain pages or tagged content, such as those set up for PPC campaigns?0 -
Setting up Webmaster Tools correctly - naked domain DNS error and sub-domains question
I'm trying to get our domain (verdantly.com) set up correctly in Google Webmaster Tools. Currently, I have three "sites" setup: blog.verdantly.com (wordpress.com blog redirected to this subdomain) www.verdantly.com verdantly.com The subdomain blog and www show up without errors. However, the naked domain shows a DNS error. I've checked the DNS settings at the registrar and don't see any issues. So here are my questions: 1. Am I correct in setting up the naked domain AND the subdomains separately in Webmaster tools? 2. How do I track down / resolve the source of the DNS errors at the naked domain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | letsdothis0 -
Creating a Filter in GA to track Parent Category
I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question... Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name. Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking? I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590