How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
-
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
-
I would not use a canonnical for your www v non www, use a 301
there is a tutorial there also to fix the index.html problem also, these tutorials are for micdrosoft iis server, if you have linux, you need to find the htaccess alternatives.
I always go for the non www, as www is of no use, so why have it, but for you i would look at what your links point to.
-
Hi Alan
Thankyou for taking the time to offer advice to me. I have read your pages and it does raise some interesting points. One that although basic, is one I haven't yet paid much attention to is the issue of "The choice of www or non-www".
This is interesting in respect of how I set my canonical tags up. I noticed that I rank differently for www.waspkilluk.co.uk than for www.waspkilluk.co.uk/index. So it seems I need to add a canonical tag there. I guess index is my home page - but then isn't the root domain also my default homepage?
In fact - do you think you should set up canonical tags without the www. or won't this work?
Sorry for creating questions from questions.
Warm Regards
Simon
-
Hi James
I have had a thorough study of this issue today and your ideas have proved fruitful. I checked out the article by Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ and then read the article by Rand Fishkin. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps.
it will take a few weeks to implement across the thousand or so pages I have, but it will be interesting to see how or if, it finally affects the root domains ranking.
Many thanks
Simon
-
James gives a good response.
i have a few tutorial pages, where a lot of the instuctions are the same, but the are still indexed and rank.
It maybe a guide of what you can get a way with
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-trailing-slash
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-upper-and-lower-case -
It is hard to give an accurate percentage, in my eyes if you want to be in the clear just make unique content on pages if it is not unique content then place a canonical tag to the right page.
I mean Google is coming down harder and harder on sites for poor quality content/duplicant content if you play by the rules and do things right tit will be a long term strategy.
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 Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Bespoke Website With Lack of Front Page Content
Hey guys, I wanted to ask you your opinion.. If you had a website - portfolio style for argument's sake and it was based on wordpress, obviously the front page won't be SEO friendly if you want to keep the minimalistic approach - there will be hardly any content to tell google what to rank your site for... So my question is, can you use a plugin that Google can 'see' content - such as a long unique article - that the user can't see in order to help you rank? I.e. for Gbot, the plugin would load the content plugin as plain html, but 'hide' it from most people visiting the site... What would you do in this scenario? Your response would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Duplicate Content for Deep Pages
Hey guys, For deep, deep pages on a website, does duplicate content matter? The pages I'm talk about are image pages associated with products and will never rank in Google which doesn't concern me. What I'm interested to know though is whether the duplicate content would have an overall effect on the site as a whole? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao1 -
Would be the network site map page considered link spam
In the course of the last 18 months my sites have lost from 50 to 70 percent of traffic. Never have used any tricks, just simple white-hat SEO. Anyway, I am now trying to fix things that hadn't been a problem before all those Google updates, but apparently now are. Would appreciate any help.. I used to have a network site map page on everyone of my sites (about 30 sites). It basically would be a page called 'our network' and it'll show a list of links to all of my other sites. These pages were indexed, had decent PR and didn't seem to cause any problem. Here's an example of one of them:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
http://www.psoriasisguide.ca/psoriasis_scg.html In the light of Panda and Penguin and all these 'bad links' I decided to get rid of most of them. My traffic didn't recover at all, it actually went further down. Not sure if there is any connection to what I'd done. So, the question is: In your opinion/experience, do you think such network sitemap pages could be causing penalties for link spam?0 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
Any experience regarding what % is considered duplicate?
Some sites (including 1 or two I work with) have a legitimate reason to have duplicate content, such as product descriptions. One way to deal with duplicate content is to add other unique content to the page. It would be helpful to have guidelines regarding what percentage of the content on a page should be unique. For example, if you have a page with 1,000 words of duplicate content, how many words of unique content should you add for the page to be considered OK? I realize that a) Google will never reveal this and b) it probably varies a fair bit based on the particular website. However... Does anyone have any experience in this area? (Example: You added 300 words of unique content to all 250 pages on your site, that each had 100 words of duplicate content before, and that worked to improve your rankings.) Any input would be appreciated! Note: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about "spinning" duplicate content to make it "unique". I am talking about adding unique content to a page that has legitimate duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0