Partially Duplicated Content Advice
-
Hi Folks,
I have a question about how duplicate content works. We sell all different kinds of goat milk soap. Each kind has its own product page and unique description. However, there are some benefits that all of the different soap have in common. I'd like to list those benefits on each individual goat milk soap page, with the product-specific benefits and description right below it. My questions are:
1. If I include the same exact block of text and images on each page, along with the unique description. Will the search engine see that as duplicate content?
2. Furthermore, will this dilute any keyword ranking ability that content brings to a page, because it occurs on 15 different pages? (i.e. the search engine can't tell which one is the "best" result).
If so, what do you recommend in this kind of situation?
Thanks,
Hal
-
Ahhh ok. So i won't worry about the duplicate content so long as there is a substantial amount of good quality original content on each page. Glad to have an understanding on this as I found it a little confusing after reading about it. Thanks!
Hal
-
Hi Hal,
Hope you don't mind me taking a stab at this question also.
Blocks of duplicate content, whether they be images or text, repeated among several pages is often known as "boilerplate" material.
Boilerplate material is okay, but if you have to much of it, without enough unique content to balance it out - that's when you get in trouble.
In general, you want to make sure you have a minimum amount of unique content on each page. My own personal rule of thumb is at least a couple hundred words - but it varies from situation to situation. if you have a lot of boilerplate, you want to make your original content front and center. This means placing it near the top of the body copy, above the fold and first in the HTML. Then place the necessary boilerplate info after this.
It's best to try to generate as much unique content for each product as possible. You can do this by including reviews, how-to videos, testimonials, or whatever value-added content you can dream up, as long as it's quality content and serves your customer.
Finally, make sure when "optimizing" the page (things like the title tag and meta description) make sure to focus these elements on the unique content of your page, and not the boilerplate material, so as to not dilute your rankings.
Best,
Cyrus
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
-
Professional Content Writters
Hello I am looking to hire a professional content writer who can do keyword research and content writing in one. Has anyone ever used a professional freelancer for this and if so, do you have any recommendations for me in terms of freelancers or websites to help me find someone? Thank you
Keyword Research | | xdunningx0 -
Is content really king?
I have a good sized website with lots of pages. Many pages are designed around specific keywords and for the most part, they rank well. I have many pages packed with good content that don't rank well, but the keywords are related to those pages that score well. Are the under performing pages contributing to the good performing pages and/or to the overall benefit of the website because of the additional content? In short, if i remove under performing pages, will it affect good performing pages and the overall performance of the website?
Keyword Research | | KrisIrr0 -
Does anyone know of a good keyword identification tool to be used on a particular piece of content?
I'm hoping for a tool that would extract keyword possibilities from an article, run them through a keyword popularity tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner and present ranked results (including number of monthly searches) to the writer. That would enable the writer to choose relevant popular keywords (especially phrases) in the web headline, page title and text. Does anyone know of such a tool? I'm considering having one built in-house if nothing already exists. How it might work Ideally, this might be a browser add-on. The user would highlight the story or blog text, and click on the browser add-on button to start the tool. Using something like viewer.opencalais, the text would plug into a keyword extraction tool and automatically run the results. In the next step the extracted terms would automatically plug into the Google AdWords Keyword Planner and run the results for “Keyword Ideas.” I think this can be done via the AdWords API: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/v201402/TrafficEstimatorService?hl=fr The user would then be presented with a series of ranked keyword possibilities based on relevance and popularity. Why it’s useful This would make it far more efficient for busy journalists (or anyone) to write effective web headlines.
Keyword Research | | TampaBayTimes0 -
Way of including Keyword into content
Hi all! My website is that of a large 7 bedroom luxury villa in Barbados (www.bruadair.com). Now, I am having problems understanding how i can include my targeted keywords in to my content without it looking unnatural and disrupting the quality of the content. I wish to use the keyword phrase 'Large luxury villa in Barbados' however including this directly into on-page elements seems to look unnatural. My current content on my home page is as follows 'Bruadair is a large luxurious villa situated on the prestigious Platinum West Coast of Barbados, located in a beautiful tropical setting with gorgeous beaches just minutes walk away' I want to rank for this keyword however changing to 'Bruadair is a large luxurious villa in Barbados, located in a beautiful tropical setting with gorgeous beaches just minutes walk away' degrades the quality of the content... is there anyway i can get round this issue? I greatly appreciate any help/advice given to my problem! Thanks once again, T
Keyword Research | | Tmgale0 -
Specific Keyword Ranking Advice
Hi Folks, We're trying to optimize the page (http://alabu.com/goat-milk-soap/) for the keyword "goat milk soap". Our page used to rank #1 before Panda (actually our home page did, not the page I'm trying to optimize on now). Now we're around rank 25. I've followed all the guidelines for on-page optimization I know, and I've done everything I can think of. We're currently executing a link building campaign but that obviously takes time. Does anyone have any advice? Is there anything else I can do to improve our ranking? Thanks, Hal
Keyword Research | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Wouldn't this be an issue of duplicate content?
I'm currently in the beginning stages of doing SEO analysis for a new client. They're an IT support company here in Phoenix, AZ. In doing some keyword research and competitive research, I've noticed that one of their competitors (who ranks in the top 3 for many of the targeted keywords), is doing something that I thought would surely be a duplicate content issue. On their home page, they have dozens of links of zip codes in the Phoenix area. Each link leads to a page devoted to that zip code. Each page is identical, except that the zip code is changed in the header tag. Most of these zip code pages are indexed in Google. Isn't this an example of duplicate content, or better yet, content spamming? I've seen this thing quite a bit with high ranking sites, and I thought these were the kinds of things that were getting taken care of in the post "Panda" era. I might just be misunderstanding this whole thing, but any guidance or intel would be greatly appreciated.
Keyword Research | | creybot0 -
Hit by Panda, what's the quickest way to remove content
One of our client's sites got hit by panda/penguin. after careful investigation we found that the site had 6,900 pages indexed out of which about 300 are actual pages (pages with quality content and add value to the user). Needless to say we had to remove all those pages. Most of the thin pages were on the blog section of the site so we removed the WP which was on www.mysite.com/blog/. My question is how can i speed up the process for Google to realize that i have taken all those this pages down. i have fetched the homepage and all linked pages via "Fetch as Google Bot" on WMT. is there anything else i can do to speed this up???
Keyword Research | | 858-SEO0 -
How do you do Keyword Research for a company that creates a lot of content
I work for a media company that owns 4 magazines. Our company is constantly producing new content. How do you do Keyword Research when the subject of your content is constantly changing? Do you need to do Keyword Research or do you simply optimize every article that you write for the web? Any ideas?
Keyword Research | | DerekSwanson0