Handling Similar page content on directory site
-
Hi All,
SEOMOZ is telling me I have a lot of duplicate content on my site. The pages are not duplicate, but very similar, because the site is a directory website with a page for cities in multiple states in the US.
I do not want these pages being indexed and was wanting to know the best way to go about this.
I was thinking I could do a rel ="nofollow" on all the links to those pages, but not sure if that is the correct way to do this.
Since the folders are deep within the site and not under one main folder, it would mean I would have to do a disallow for many folders if I did this through Robots.txt.
The other thing I am thinking of is doing a meta noindex, follow, but I would have to get my programmer to add a meta tag just for this section of the site.
Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this so I can eliminate these dup pages from my SEO report and from the search engine index?
Thanks!
-
Thanks Kane!
Meta-robots it is!
I will apply it and see how I go with it.
Cheers
-
The best solution is to use on those pages.
I believe that using robots.txt will still allow the URLs to be shown as URLs in search results, so that is less ideal. Not certain if that's still the case, but it used to be that way.
I personally would not nofollow links to that page, because if you use "noindex, follow" it will in turn pass value to other indexed pages, and nofollowing links to a noindex page isn't supposed to increase pagerank to other links on the page.
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 in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections
Hello everyone! I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct. Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections. I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!! -----------------CODES BELOW--------------- <title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ycnetpro101
{% if page_description %} {% endif %} {% if current_page != 1 %} {% else %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if product %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}0 -
Keyword stuffing on category pages - eCommerce site
Hi there fellow Mozzers. I work for a wine company, and I have a theory that some of our category pages are not ranking as well as they could, due to keyword stuffing. The best example is our Champagne category page, which we are trying to rank for the keyword Champagne, currently rank 6ish. However, when I load the page into Moz, it tells me that I might be stuffing, which I am not, BUT my products might be giving both Moz and Google this impression as well. Our product names for any given Champagne is "Champagne - {name}" and the producer is "Champagne {producer name}. Now, on the category pages we have a list of Champagnes, actually 44 Which means that with the way we display them, with both name of the wine, the name of the producer AND the district. That means we have 132 mentions of the word "Champagne" + the content text that I have written. I am wondering, how good is Google at identifying that this is in fact not stuffing, but rather functionality that makes for this high density of the keyword? Is there anything I can do? I mean, we can change it so it's not listed with Champagne on all the products, but I believe it would make the usability suffer a bit, not a lot - but it's a question of balance and I would like to hear if anyone has encountered a similar problem, if it is in fact a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nikolaj-Landrock2 -
Mixing up languages on the same page + possible duplicate content
I have a site in English hosted under .com with English info, and then different versions of the site under subdirectories (/de/, /es/, etc.) Due to budget constraints we have only managed to translate the most important info of our product pages for the local domains. We feel however that displaying (on a clearly identified tab) the detailed product info in English may be of use for many users that can actually understand English, and may help us get more conversions to have that info. The problem is that this detailed product info is already used on the equivalent English page as well. This basically means 2 things: We are mixing languages on pages We have around 50% of duplicate content of these pages What do you think that the SEO implications of this are? By the way, proper Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions as well as implementation of href lang tag are in place.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauraseo0 -
How to deal with very similar (thin) content by design?
Hello all, I run a website which lists direct contact details (tel. and email.) of organisations. I have 100s of similar pages which are very thin on content (by design). Each page has a couple of lines of somewhat unique content. People find the site useful since it simply tells them which number to dial in order to speak to a real person at any given organisation. They can't easily find the information elsewhere and I believe it satisfies search intent. Am I at risk for being flagged for duplicate / low quality content? Should I add more text simply to add 'unique' content to each page even though it adds no value to users? That doesn't seem right either! Looking forward to hear where you guys stand on this, Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nathandh80 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Copying contents from a blog site (External) to a company blogsite (internal)
Hi, I have a client that has several external blogs www.blogsite1.info www.blogsite2.info and he also has the www.companywebsite.com the main domain of course is the comapnywebsite.com. They are doing some thing wrong, because instead of generating contents inside the main domain, the create contents in the blogsites and send links to the blogsites to see those contents. So they are inviting their users to EXIT the website... So, I told him, If you want to generate contents, please keep a blog INSIDE your domain www.companywebsite.com/blog, but keep the other ones, cause they are generating links (they are .info domains, that is not good, but they are nice keyword match domains) Now, he told me he was thinking on copy and paste the contents from the external blogsites to the internal website. I warned him about generating duplicate content. But.... is it really a problem? They are not in the same domain... Could google give a penalty because of that to the main domain? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Changing content in a well established page.
I have a question i rank well for O'fallon lawn care and I dont rank well for O'Fallon, MO lawn care. Is it ok to go in that page and add some content optimizing it around O'Fallon, MO Lawn care or is that a bad idea. Appreciate any feed back thanks everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gslc0 -
How much is too much content for a home-page?
Hey guys, I'm looking to implement a strategy where I put a 20,000 word article on my home-page. It won't be a super-long page, this content will be divided into nested tabs. The content will also be found on individual pages (corresponding to the tabs) on the site, but these will have a canonical tag pointing to the home page, Will I get penalized for this kind of structure? Cheers, JC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trx0