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
-
Duplicate Content
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
Supplier Videos & Duplicate Content
Hi, We have some supplier videos the product management want to include on these product pages. I am wondering how detrimental this is for SEO & the best way to approach this. Do we simply embed the supplier YouTube videos, or do we upload them to our YouTube - referencing the original content & then embed our YouTube videos? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
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 clarity required
Hi, I have access to a masive resource of journals that we have been given the all clear to use the abstract on our site and link back to the journal. These will be really useful links for our visitors. E.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/59210832213382K2 Simply, if we copy the abstract and then link back to the journal source will this be treated as duplicate content and damage the site or is the link to the source enough for search engines to realise that we aren't trying anything untoward. Would it help if we added an introduction so in effect we are sort of following the curating content model? We are thinking of linking back internally to a relevant page using a keyword too. Will this approach give any benefit to our site at all or will the content be ignored due to it being duplicate and thus render the internal links useless? Thanks Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayderby0 -
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 -
Duplicate page content and duplicate pate title
Hi, i am running a global concept that operates with one webpage that has lot of content, the content is also available on different domains, but with in the same concept. I think i am getting bad ranking due to duplicate content, since some of the content is mirrored from the main page to the other "support pages" and they are almost 200 in total. Can i do some changes to work around this or am i just screwed 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartmedia0