How to Fix Duplicate Page Content?

[lbohen]

Our latest SEOmoz crawl reports 1138 instances of "duplicate page content."

I have long been aware that our duplicate page content is likely a major reason Google has de-valued our Web store.

Our duplicate page content is the result of the following:

1. We sell audio books and use the publisher's description (narrative) of the title. Google is likely recognizing the publisher as the owner / author of the description and our description as duplicate content.

2. Many audio book titles are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher so the basic description on our site would be the same at our Web store for each format = more duplicate content at our Web store.

Here's are two examples (one abridged, one unabridged) of one title at our Web store.

Kill Shot - abridged

Kill Shot - unabridged

How much would the body content of one of the above pages have to change so that a SEOmoz crawl does NOT say the content is duplicate?

[Dr-Pete]

Just wanted to add a note that our tools do not detect duplicates across domains or on other websites, so these warnings are completely tied to your own pages/URLs.

These are "near" duplicates in our view, and Takeshi is right - there are many possible solutions. I'm guessing you can't directly combine them, from an e-commerce standpoint, but I would suggest either making a "parent" page and using rel=canonical, or just making sure there's navigation between the formats/versions and then pointing rel=canonical to the most common version (i.e. that your customers buy).

Technically, this will remove one version from ranking consideration, but I think that's preferable to having 100s or 1000s of versions out there and diluting your ranking ability or even having Panda-related problems. It's one thing if you have Amazon's link profile, but the rest of us aren't so lucky.

[lbohen]

Good question. The canonical tag may be part of our solution.

I am also planning on having a "main" product with the description and any variations (abridged, unabridged, CD, MP3 CD) as subproducts which would use the main products' description. I.E. There would only be one product page with the description, not multiple. This will still result in our main products' page having the same description as the publisher. We have 1000s of audio products. Paying someone or doing it ourselves to create enough unique content on these pages would be prohibitive. Some high ranking competitors of ours have the same description as the publisher so Google must be taking something else into consideration to value them much higher than us.

[jesse-landry]

They are saying the pages on your site have duplicate content. Those two pages you linked are a perfect example. The content is exactly the same minus two words, which is more than enough for Google to register it as duplicate..

What I don't understand is what's wrong with a simple canonical tag in this instance? Do you really need both of these indexed?

[lbohen]

When SEOmoz identifies pages at our Web store with duplicate content is SEOmoz saying one of both of the following:

1. More than one page at our Web store has the same content.

2. One or more pages at our Web store has the same content as another page on the Web.

[Asher]

Agreed with everything Takeshi just said, but only left out one thing.  Once you combine pages, make sure to 301 redirect the old pages to the new url.  If you don't want to combine remember to use rel=canonical to delineate which type of permalink has the authority.

Hope that helps.

[TakeshiYoung]

There are no easy fixes here. Here are a few things that are common practice among etailers to reduce duplicate content:

1. Combine similar pages into one. So abridged & unabridged would be on one page, with a drop-down menu to select the different versions of the product.
2. Re-write the product descriptions, from scratch (you can hire people to do this).
3. Add your own unique content in addition to the provided description, such editorial reviews, recommendations, historical information, product specs, etc.
4. Add user reviews, so that users can generate unique content for you.
5. Create a unique user experience that improves the shopping experience on your site. Why should a user shop at your store, and not Amazon? Why should Google rank your site above Amazon? What differentiates you?

Like I said, there are no quick fixes for unique content. You either have to re-write the descriptions, add your own unique content, or both.