What constitutes duplicate content?
-
I have a website that lists various events. There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012. It will probably happen again sometime in the future too. Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details.
In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag. I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content.
I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work. Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?
-
Hi Atul,
Different languages is NOT seen as duplicate content. If you take the same article and present it in both English and Spanish, that would be considered two unique articles.
-
Hi Ryan,
What about a site in 3 different languages Targetting 3 countries with same content ?
Would Google consider it as duplicate content.
Thanks
-
You rock!
-
Duplicate content is determined when a significant percentage of the content (i.e. the words on the page) is duplicated on another web page. Sorry if that seems too obvious but that's the definition. I am not sure what percentage SEOmoz or Google uses to determine duplicate content but based on your description it sounds like 90%+ of the content is duplicated.
Some options:
1. Add unique content to the page. Work to ensure at least 50% of the content is unique to the page. You can share information specific to the month involved. A Christmas pool party might be cold and you can talk about the holiday involvement. You can share images from the prior year's event, experiences from participants, etc.
2. Move the content to a single page. You can offer a single event page with information about each month the event is held.
3. You can maintain a single active page at a time. After the December event is over you can remove the page, publish the March 2012 page and 301 redirect the December URL to the March page.
4. You can canonicalize the various versions to a single page. If you take this step it is important to keep track of the indexed page version.
5. You can noindex all except one of the pages.
I suggest the above options are in order of preference. The first option will likely yield the best results. If you are not willing to go with that option, try the second option, and so forth.
-
Thx for the reply.
The events come up as separate instances when people are browsing our site. E.g., they browse all upcoming events at a certain swimming pool (rec center), and get a listing with a brief overview. Then they can click on an event details page. 1 event details page per event.
E.g., http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/12/crystal-pool-and-fitness-centre-victoria-bc/events/
From a user experience, this works great. question was asked because I don't want to be penalized for having duplicate content.
-
You could use the Rel="canoncial" tag but that will affect your search rankings.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Are people actually searching for each month separately? If not, this might not be much of a concern.
Could you create a page that lists all the dates and that would be a where you could point the Rel="canoncial" tag to?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Big problem with duplicate page content
Hello! I am a beginner SEO specialist and a have a problem with duplicate pages content. The site I'm working on is an online shop made with Prestashop. The moz crawl report shows me that I have over 4000 duplicate page content. Two weeks ago I had 1400. The majority of links that show duplicate content looks like bellow:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ana_g
http://www.sitename.com/category-name/filter1
http://www.sitename.com/category-name/filter1/filter2 Firstly, I thought that the filtres don't work. But, when I browse the site and I test it, I see that the filters are working and generate links like bellow:
http://www.sitename.com/category-name#/filter1
http://www.sitename.com/category-name#/filter1/filter2 The links without the # do not work; it messes up with the filters.
Why are the pages indexed without the #, thus generating me duplicate content?
How can I fix the issues?
Thank you very much!0 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Duplicate Content: Organic vs Local SEO
Does Google treat them differently? I found something interesting just now and decided to post it up http://www.daviddischler.com/is-duplicate-content-treated-differently-when-local-seo-comes-into-play/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1