How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
-
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry)
Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example)
Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword.
These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc)
Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure
So - to questions/thoughts.
1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally.
2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them)
3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant?
4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that?
I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
-
I think your header links will look spammy.
Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).
-
Great help here folks, thanks.
One last question if i may - each of the 3 sites links to the other 2 in the header (on every page), so i've got x00 cross-referencing links.
Any value in making them rel=no-follow? Don't want to remove them necessarily.
-
IIS7 supports a type of mod_rewrite. But even if you can't use that, you should have access to ASP or .NET and can easily use those to do your 301s
-
ISS has no problems doing 301s, and if you can use php, asp or anything similar you can just manualy put a 301 on each page if that fails.
No rel-canonical solution will result in all 3 sites ranking as far as I am aware.
Your best option is usualy one site with geo-located pages. If it has to be 3 sites, then the only real option is to make all that content unique, on unique ips e.t.c., which at the end of the day is 3X the work or more.
-
No problem, best of luck and let us know how you get on!
-
Thanks for all the replies everyone. Tricky isn't it?
Moving to 1 site is probably the best medium/long-term option. The 3 sites thing is historical in that sites 2 and 3 were purchased (physically) by the owner over last few years.
Biggest problem with totally new is that (afaik anyway, according to hosting company) i can't 301 old sites to this new site due to the shared hosting issue (using IIS as well, not Apache), so perhaps getting them split out is proper interim measure. (I might be able to do something via WMTools with this though i guess)
Will do some more research into use of canonical cross-domain and attempt the on-page rewrite as well as talking to client about moving sites to unique hosts.
thanks again.
-
why is it hard to restate the content in a different way? reword it. If it's products then change the order and write unique content on the bottom. By east west north south exactly what types of regions are you talking about and why do you need three sites to accomplish this instead of one with geo targeted LPs?
-
you can certainly use the canonical, however you probably wont rank from domains 2 and 3 as your telling Google not to attribute the content to those domains.
I'm still missing the bit where having thee regionalized sites is beneficial to your visitors, why not make one general site with the products and then do some geo-targeted pages?(thats what I would do, makes for a much simpler task).
best of luck with which ever way you go, but come back and let us know what happens
-
The benefit to the user is that they will need to visit physical site to view/purchase and as such, wouldn't click on say, North site (even if it was top 2 or 3) if they were in South.
Are you (both) saying it'd be ok to link rel canonical domain1/page.html on domains 2 and 3? (i.e. different domain names)
Thanks.
-
how is this for good measure?
"Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure :)"
Make them as unique and separate as possible. Different templates, different hosting, different email contact, different contact info on domain registration, write content on the page and geo target the wording.
-
What is the benefit to the user for an individual sites for North, South and west?
Are you not just creating a lot of work for yourself, especially since as you state ''would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally" which ultimately means each site is competing against the others.
I would rethink my strategy, Your more likely to rank 'generally' for your chosen terms if you focus your efforts on one site and perhaps use canonical tags on the other two to ensure Google knows who to attribute the content too.
-
There's not too many options here. Geotargeted (even locally) tends to produce duplicate content. The only option, really, is to canonical all your products to one place. If you do it right, you might be able to rank all three sites for your keyword.
You can try #1 but, as you said, it's hard to restate the same content in a non-duplicated way.
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
-
Duplicate content, the distrubutors are copying the content of the manufacturer
Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply. For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate. Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content? The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompucastWeb1 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
Duplicate Content, Campaign Explorer & Rel Canonical
Google Advises to use Rel Canonical URL's to advise them which page with similiar information is more relevant. You are supposed to put a rel canonical on the non-preferred pages to point back to the desired page. How do you handle this with a product catalog using ajax, where the additional pages do not exist? An example would be: <colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com
| .com/productcategory.aspx?page=1 /productcategory.aspx?page=2 /productcategory.aspx?page=3 /productcategory.aspx?page=4 The page=1,2,3 and 4 do not physically exist, they are simply referencing additional products I have rel canonical urls' on the main page www.examplesite.com/productcategory.aspx, but I am not 100% sure this is correct or how else it could be handled. Any Ideas Pro mozzers? |0