Duplicate Content on Website with Multiple Locations
-
Hi there,
I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do.
We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1), and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help.
We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings?
Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.
-
HI,
It doesn't redirect the user, no. It tells Google 'which URL' you prefer to be indexed. Now, again I don't believe that this is the best option, as you want BOTH cities to rank. Does it affect the rankings? Yes, because you are saying Page A is more valuable than the duplicated Page B- leaving Page B out in the wild as the less important page for ranking.
So, again having two versions of the domains ( based on the cities) isn't beneficial, these should both be under one domain ( wp installation) and adding a "locations" page, to reduce the self competition.
-
Thank you for your help Tammy. I read through your links when you first replied and they helped a lot.
Pardon my lack of knowledge here, but I just want to make sure I understand correctly: If I go the rel=canonical route for the "duplicate" pages, it won't actually redirect the user, but will just tell google where the "original" page lives, and that it's duplicated on purpose correct? Does that then hurt the rankings for the site that's not showing as the "original" content?
Thanks again for your help.
-
While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.
Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.
Here are a few articles about that:
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains
Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.
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
-
Location National vs. Country - Different Ranking
Why is the ranking for a keyword different for the locations National and for example Austria ... both should bring the ranking for the whole country, but often they are different?
Moz Bar | | Art-of-Artists0 -
Content suggestion
Hello, What is the secret sauce of your content suggestion. How do you consider that a topic is covered. Please explain. Thank you, Flvien
Moz Bar | | seoanalytics0 -
Why do my Moz duplicate content results show me pages with no noticeably similar content?
Sometimes the "Pages with Duplicate Content" results under Content Issues show pages that, from what I'm able to see or otherwise test, have no duplicate content, save for the same navigation that exists on all of my pages. For example, a recent issue said that the following pages had duplicate content:
Moz Bar | | rickmic
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/html/slider-overlay
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/ufaqs/what-do-i-get-with-my-purchase-of-freezerworks
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/videos/fda-and-freezerworks-2
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/lims-testing-module Even a side-by-side of the page source in a text comparison tool shows nothing but navigation and scripts used in every page. Am I not seeing something?2 -
Significant difference with DA scores on Moz Chrome app VS Website Tool
I saw a big difference between DA scores on Moz Chrome app VS Website Tool. Which DA score is the correct one? I personally believe the scores on Moz's site is most accurate. Do you happen to have issues syncing the scored to your Chrome app? Chrome App VS. Moz Research Tool (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/researchtools/ose/)
Moz Bar | | iPrice_Marketing
Moz.com: 92 / 88 Here's a screenshot of the difference: https://ipricegroup-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jeremy_chew/ESy9lzUTC3lOl8o93Sx6LsUB8mYXo8LmYuUj2aa0xLXi1A?e=A6OrXs This was evident in other websites too:
Priceza (priceza.com.my😞 38 / 24
Shopback (shopback.my😞 43 / 41
Cuponation (https://www.cuponation.com.my/😞 27 / 250 -
Why do i get multiple variations of my url with ?order=asc and ?view=list at the end of it in my crawl report?
I just did a crawl for one my clients to validate any error in the structure. Next thing I know is that the website have multiple variation of the same url with query like ?order=asc and ?view=list at the end of it. I am wondering why these url variations appears in the crawl I just did since bots aren't suppose to go further thant the ? normally. Just to show you a couple of url's of my crawl test. <colgroup><col width="484"></colgroup>
Moz Bar | | alexrbrg
| https://test.com/exemple/?per_page=9 |
| https://test.com/exemple/?per_page=15 |
| https://test.com/exemple/?per_page=30 |
| https://test.com/exemple/?orderby=popularity |
| https://test.com/exemple/?orderby=date |
| https://test.com/exemple/?orderby=price |
| https://test.com/exemple/?orderby=price-desc |
| https://test.com/exemple/?order=asc |
| https://test.com/exemple/?order=desc |
| https://test.com/exemple/?view=list | Thank you Guys0 -
Duplicate page content
The MOZ crawler identifies pages as duplicate content which are not the same.
Moz Bar | | aignerart
The pages http://www.aignerart.com/abstracts-oil-painting/cicli-colora.html and http://www.aignerart.com/abstracts-oil-painting/murs-de-la-ville.html are marked duplicate but they are different paintings. Any ideas?0 -
Duplicate Page Title query in the PRO Campaign tool
Can someone help me on this. I am seeing duplicate page titles on the PRO Campaign Crawl tool on an ecommerce site for example MOZ is saying that these two pages have a duplicate page title: http://www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk/colour-25mm-snap-frames/25mm-green-snap-frame/a0-traffic-green-snap-frame-25mm/prod_1730.html http://www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk/snap-picture-poster-frames/colour-25mm-snap-frames/green-25mm-snap-frame/a0-traffic-green-snap-frame-25mm/prod_1730.html They are the the same product in two categories. When I view the source of both pages the this link is the same in the meta: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk/colour-25mm-snap-frames/25mm-green-snap-frame/a0-traffic-green-snap-frame-25mm/prod_1730.html](view-source:http://www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk/colour-25mm-snap-frames/25mm-green-snap-frame/a0-traffic-green-snap-frame-25mm/prod_1730.html)" /> So is there something else I need to have done to erradicate this or is it not an issue? Thanks in advance Tracy
Moz Bar | | dashesndots0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report on MOZ
Hi, I am just wondering as to the accuracy of this report - does it pick up all the duplicate on page content? Or is there a limit? We have an ecommerce store with a lot of copied and pasted descriptions - just wondering if there is a limit on how much the moz crawler picks up? In other words, once we fix what MOZ has detected, will there be more detected because it is limited to display say up to 200?? Hope you understand what I mean. Thanks
Moz Bar | | bjs20100