Local Search | Website Issue with Duplicate Content (97 pages)
-
Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page.
Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page.
Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?
-
Thank you Miriam.
-
Thanks Miriam!
-
Hi Todd, I'm endorsing Kevin's response as a best answer on this, but also want to add that it will be easier on the client if he makes a plan now to begin to improve the content of key pages rather than scramble to do so after rankings suddenly fall off. Local rankings are in a constant state of flux...drops can happen so swiftly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I would identify the 10 most important cities and write unique content for them, then move on to the 10 next-most important and so on. Do it in a way the client can afford, at a velocity you can manage.
-
Good morning Kevin - most of the individual pages receive little traffic. Thank you for your advice and feedback.
-
Hi Daniel - thank you for response and advice!
-
Hi Todd,
How much traffic is each of those pages getting? Chances are if you look at them over 50% of them are getting little if any traffic. As you know, ranking on the first page in local search really doesn't mean much. You need to be in the top 3 (or 3-5 if maps is displaying results).
My advice would be to help the client focus on the best areas (Based on traffic, demographics, distance, etc.) and the ones that are currently driving traffic then create unique content for each of those pages. This could also bring down the too many links per page signal.
I did this with one of my clients and their rank improved to where they were #1 & #2 for their top 10 areas that were driving 90% of their traffic. If they want to continue targeting all 97 each page should have unique content. Their rankings will definitely improve if done right.
Anyways, I know it's a balancing act of the best strategy and what the clients budget will allow you to do so in the end you have to make the best decision.
Cheers,
Kevin
-
I myself have done this for many clients. I have used a generic paragraph with near duplicate content on over 3000+ pages for one client and it has been going strong for many years. I have also tested websites with near 100% duplicate body text with exception to title, description, h1, image alts and they are ranking good as well with no problems.
I would advise the client of the risk of having duplicate content. You could use textbroker to write some content for each page at around $5 each just to be safe and to feel comfortable moving forward with SEO.
Most of my clients have come to me from other SEO's and I'm always wondering what will drop off when I optimize something because the work was clearly black/grey hat. The good thing is they know the value of SEO already and agree to pay to just fix old issues before moving forward most of the time.
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
-
We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.
Hi We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.Does anyone know of someone that can help? Reduce server response time Optimize images Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content Avoid landing page redirects Leverage browser caching Minify CSS Minify JavaScript Minify HTML
Technical SEO | | Bev.Aquaspresso0 -
Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited. I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
Technical SEO | | Essentia
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that: a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'? What's your view on this? Thanks1 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Many Errors on E-commerce website mainly Duplicate Content - Advice needed please!
Hi Mozzers, I would need some advice on how to tackle one of my client’s websites. We have just started doing SEO for them and after moz crawled the e-commerce it has detected: 36 329 Errors – 37496 warnings and 2589 Notices all going up! Most of the errors are due to duplicate titles and page content but I cannot identify where the duplicate pages come from, these are the links moz detected of the Duplicate pages (unfortunately I cannot add the website for confidentiality reasons) : • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_2=&products_per_00&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&page=2 With these URLs it is quite hard to identify which pages need to be canonicalize. And this is jsut an example out of thousands on this website. If anyone would have any advice on how to fix this and how to tackle 37496 errors on a website like this that would be great. Thank you for your time, Lyam
Technical SEO | | AlphaDigital0 -
If content is at the bottom of the page but the code is at the top, does Google know that the content is at the bottom?
I'm working on creating content for top category pages for an ecommerce site. I can put them under the left hand navigation bar, and that content would be near the top in the code. I can also put the content at the bottom center, where it would look nicer but be at the bottom of the code. What's the better approach? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Duplicate content in Magento
Hi all We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing. For example: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page. Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess? Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
How to handle .mobi and normal website for mobile search and regular search
Hi, we have our regular website at jameda.de and a mobile only page at jameda.mobi Users on mobile devices will be automatically redirected to .mobi if they click on a link to jameda.de in the SERPs. What is the best practice to ensure, that Googlebot is indexing jameda.de and Googlebot Mobile is indexing jameda.mobi without duplicate content issues and having Link-Juice benefits on mobile search at the same time? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | jameda0