Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does Google index dynamically generated content/headers, etc.?
-
To avoid dupe content, we are moving away from a model where we have 30,000 pages, each with a separate URL that looks like /prices/<product-name>/<city><state>, often with dupe content because the product overlaps from city to city, and it's hard to keep 30,000 pages unique, where sometimes the only distinction is the price & the city/state.</state></city></product-name>
We are moving to a model with around 300 unique pages, where some of the info that used to be in the url will move to the page itself (headers, etc.) to cut down on dupe content on those unique 300 pages.
My question is this. If we have 300 unique-content pages with unique URL's, and we then put some dynamic info (year, city, state) into the page itself, will Google index this dynamic content?
The question behind this one is, how do we continue to rank for searches for that product in the city-state being searched without having that info in the URL?
Any best practices we should know about?
-
Hi there,
Not sure I have enough information to weigh in on the first part of your question - Google will index whatever it sees on the page. If you deliver the content to Google, then they index it. The problem comes when you deliver different content to different users. Try a tool like SEO Browser to see how googlebot views your site.
To answer your second question, its often hard to rank near-duplicate pages for specific cities/states without running into massive duplicate content problems. Matt Cutts himself actually addressed this awhile back. He basically stated if you have multiple pages all targeting different locations, it's best to include a few lines of unique content on each page (I recommend the top) to make each unique.
“In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine,” Source
But this technique would be very hard with only 300 product page. The alternative, stuffing these pages with city/state information for every combination possible, is not advised.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/on-page-optimization-to-rank-for-multiply-cities
So in the end, it's actually not hard to rank for city-state keywords without having it in the URL, but the information should be in the content or other places like the title tag or internal link structure - but to do this for 1000's of locations with only 300 pages without keyword stuffing is near impossible.
The best thing to do is figure out how to create unique content for every page you want to rank for, and take that route.
For example, I might create a "Seattle" page, create unique content for the top of the page, then list 50 or so products with the unique Seattle prices. (This is a rough strategy - you'd have to refine it greatly to work for your situation.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I see. To get the city-state pages indexed then they must have their own URL. If you can only access it via posting a form (assumed for using the search feature), the a search engine can't see it.
To get round this, you could put a links underneath the search box to popular searches. This will get them indexed.
Does that answer the questions?
Thanks
Iain - Reload
-
Thanks for the reply. The city-state content wouldn't be driven by the URL, it would be driven by the city-state that the user searched for. ie if the person searched for <product><city><state>I would want our /product/ page to show up, and show them content in their local city state.</state></city></product>
-
Hi Editable Text,
In short if you show Google a crawlable link to the content with the dynamic header/content, and the content is driven by the unique URL, yes it will index it.
As with any SEO/life question, there are a few t&c's with this.
- The pages need to be unique enough not to be classed as duplicate content
- Make sure it's intelligently linked internally
- You have external links pointing deep into the site
- You have a decent site architecture
To answer you second question, you'll need unique pages for each location, unless your content would be so thin, you'd need to group them. The URL doesn't have to include the keyword, but it's damn helpful if it does.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
Updating Old Content at Scale - Any Danger from a Google Penalty/Spam Perspective?
We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | paulz9990 -
Can we change Title and/or Descriptions Dynamically Based on Search Query
If I recall we used to be able to change our title attributes tag dynamically based on the search query but not sure if it's possible now or if it makes sense to do so. Thoughts? Rosemary
On-Page Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
Duplicate content on partner site
I have a trade partner who will be using some of our content on their site. What's the best way to prevent any duplicate content issues? Their plan is to attribute the content to us using rel=author tagging. Would this be sufficient or should I request that they do something else too? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ShearingsGroup0 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2