What is the Impact of Duplicate Content on Multiple Managed Property Domains?
-
Hi Moz Community!
Our team is having an internal (and external) debate regarding the extent and implications of duplicate content for a hospitality client that I would love to get some feedback on. I unfortunately cannot divulge the brand/URL, but will give as much info as possible.
The brand in question manages dozens of properties in the US and worldwide and has recently rolled up all of the domains under a singular brand.com domain. So whereas the properties used to have their own domains (property1.com, property2.com, etc...), they are now housed in sub-folders (brand.com/property1, brand.com/property2.com and so forth).
The concern we have is that they launched the new brand site with all of the property sites/content rolled up under the new brand.com domain, however all of the individual property sites and their pages are still live as well. All of the canonicals on both brand.com as well as property1.com (property2.com, property3.com, etc...) are self-referencing (so the canonicals for brand.com/property1 and all of its sub-ages do not point to the still live property1.com and all of its sub-pages, for example).
On the brand side, they believe this is the best path forward as brand.com grows and gains some authority, with the later intent on eventually redirecting the individual property domains - but we are unclear of that timeline (though we do think its more months as opposed to days/weeks)
So our questions for the community here are:
- What is the perceived impact in this state of limbo to the individual property sites (ideally they house the original content and have the history, but could Google still give preference to the brand.com/property URLs and/or could both of them suffer in rank/search experience from the duplicate content an non-uniform presentation?)
- Could brand.com be "dinged" so-to-speak due to launching with this much duplicate content? (And if so, could that affect how quickly normalization occurs after the property sites are finally redirected?)
- Anything else we should consider/Any other feedback from the community?
Thank you all for your time and support!
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 - Different URLs and Content on each
Seeing a lot of duplicate content instances of seemingly unrelated pages. For instance, http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-bluetooth-speakers.html?from=topnav3 is being tracked as a duplicate of http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-planners-diaries.html?resultsperpg=viewall. Does anyone else see this issue? Is there a solution anyone is aware of?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Quickview popup duplicate content
Hi We have an eccomerce site. We just added to the product list view a quickview tab - when you roll mouse over it a popup window with the product image and short description shows up - is this a problem of duplicate content( its the same content that's on the product pages except there we also have a long detailed description) - t is done with javascript. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | henya0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
Duplicate Content - Just how killer is it?
Yesterday I received my ranking report and was extremely disappointed that my high-priority pages dropped in rank for a second week in a row for my targeted keywords. This is after running them through the gradecard and getting As for each of them on the keywords I wanted. I looked at my google webmaster tools and saw new duplicate content pages listed, which were the ones I had just modified to get my keyword targeting better. In my hastiness to work on getting the keyword usage up, I neglected to prevent these descriptions from coming up when viewing the page with filter parameters, sort parameters and page parameters... so google saw these descriptions as duplicate content (since myurl.html and myurl.html?filter=blah are seen as different). So my question: is this the likely culprit for some pretty drastic hits to ranking? I've fixed this now, but are there any ways to prevent this in the future? (I know _of _canonical tags, but have never used them, and am not sure if this applies in this situation) Thanks! EDIT: One thing I forgot to ask as well: has anyone inflicted this upon themselves? And how long did it take you to recover?
Technical SEO | | Ask_MMM0 -
Google , 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.
Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content. This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner. I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary. I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws. About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results. Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content. All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure. The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be). Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions. My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well? Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law. With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other. So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational? Thanks again for any help.
Technical SEO | | Steviebone0 -
Duplicate Content -->?ss=facebook
Hi there, When searching site:mysite.com my keyword I found the "same page" twice in the SERP's. The URL's look like this: Page 1: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm Page 2: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm**?ss=facebook** The ?ss=facebook is caused by a bookmark button inserted in some of our product pages. My question is... will the canonical tag do to solve this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15565529539090 -
E-Commerce Duplicate Content
Hello all We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL! 😞 Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc. I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential? I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects? Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow! Cheers Todd
Technical SEO | | toddyC0