Unavoidable duplicate page
-
Hi,
I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g.
Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Stuart
-
Thanks for your help with this. In the end we decided to go down the nofollow route after consulting the developer with your suggestions.
Stu
-
It's okay, we all just want to give you the best answer we can. It can be tough without specifics to give you actionable advice, but I'll keep trying!
My gut feeling here (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that if there is any appreciable difference in content (as you indicate above), then the dupe content thing may not be a problem. This sort of problem only exists for pages with multiple urls (like in more than one subdomain) or old mirrors that were never taken down and such. If you offer similar services with alot of the same content but slightly different service sections, you shouldn't be flagged for dupes.
Why not skip any tactics for now, get the site launched, remove the older content, and use Moz to run a crawl and see if any further content is flagged? Sounds to me like this is a borderline dupe content issue and may not really be a problem for the engines. I don't think I can really say until the pages are live. Let us know when they are!
-
The content in the 'details' subsections are identical between service 1 and 2, but the details sections aren't identical within their own service sections. Anyone confused yet?! I'm really sorry I can't share any links of the site, it's currently still in development.
Stu
-
Tentative yes. If the subsections are different "pages" it should work the same.
However, since you aren't specific with the URLs, I can't visit the pages to see how exactly appropriate this is. I've optimized thousands of paginated and product pages with this problem, and rel-canonicaling (yes I made up that verb) them worked best for us. If you'd like a more accurate answer, feel free to share example URLs for me to poke around in.
-
That DOES sound cool...
So will that also work for any sub-sections within the product-x section too? I probably should have mentioned but product-x has a sub set of pages which arn't unique e.g.
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-2
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-1
domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-2
Stu
-
So if you have to FORCE the engines to prioritize one of multiple duplicates, you have a few options. Assuming you want both pages to exist, you can provide a nofollow or noindex rule to one of the duplicates. This is a blunt approach which works well but not really the coolest.
The coolest option is to give one a canonical tag. Telling the engines that one of the multiple duplicates is the "canonical" one is what Google even recommends (and it has all sorts of neat downstream SEO benefits anyway.
So add a "rel canonical" tag to the "proper" page. Matt lays it out here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Let us know how it goes!
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your response. I probably should have said but I have vastly simplified the description of this problem. Product-x is actually made of lots of components and sub pages within itself. Which is the reason I can't re-write product-x for each service section.
So there will be lots of duplicate pages within each product-x section. The service 1 and 2 sections are unique however.
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
Is product-x just one component in each of these services along with other components?
If so, could you not solve this by having content on each of the service pages about those services and then a small amount of info about product-x on each of those pages with a read more type link to product-x on the actual product-x page.
So you would have:
domain.com/service1
domain.com/service2both of which point to a page showing product-x at domain.com/product-x
If that is not possible then there isn't a way around having duplicate pages as I can see it.
Peter
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
-
Google keeps marking different pages as duplicates
My website has many pages like this: mywebsite/company1/valuation mywebsite/company2/valuation mywebsite/company3/valuation mywebsite/company4/valuation ... These pages describe the valuation of each company. These pages were never identical but initially, I included a few generic paragraphs like what is valuation, what is a valuation model, etc... in all the pages so some parts of these pages' content were identical. Google marked many of these pages as duplicated (in Google Search Console) so I modified the content of these pages: I removed those generic paragraphs and added other information that is unique to each company. As a result, these pages are extremely different from each other now and have little similarities. Although it has been more than 1 month since I made the modification, Google still marks the majority of these pages as duplicates, even though Google has already crawled their new modified version. I wonder whether there is anything else I can do in this situation? Thanks
Technical SEO | | TuanDo96270 -
Duplicate Landing Pages showing up in search results
Hey Guys, I recently noticed that our Christmas Gifts landing page was ranking twice in the Google serps for the query "Christmas Gifts." One of these pages is an old url that has already been 301 redirected to the new url page which is also showing up in the search results. In the results, the following shows up in position 2 & 3 for the Christmas Gifts query: <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/christmas/christmas-gifts</cite> <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/occasions/christmas-gifts/christmas-gifts</cite>The url with "occasions" in it has already been 301 redirected to the url above it. Not sure why this is still showing up. I know it takes Google some time to index 301s and sometimes they show old urls, but it's been a few months since the old "occasions" url was redirected.The title tags for these pages are different but they are actually the same page. The new "gifts" version of the url was made live in the Navigation of our site just last week and before that it was hidden from our Navigation. Would this be the reason it's now showing up in search?Any ideas on why this might be happening? ThanksExplanations?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Need Help With WWW vs. Non-WWW Duplicate Pages
A friend I'm working with at RedChairMarket.com is having duplicate page issues. Among them, both www and non-www URLs are being generated automatically by his software framework, ASP.net mvc 3. How should we go about finding and tackling these duplicates? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
Is it bad to have your pages as .php pages?
Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Mitigating duplicate page content on dynamic sites such as social networks and blogs.
Hello, I recently did an SEOMoz crawl for a client site. As it typical, the most common errors were duplicate page title and duplicate content. The client site is a custom social network for researchers. Most of the pages that showing as duplicate are simple variations of each user's profile such as comment sections, friends pages, and events. So my question is how can we limit duplicate content errors for a complex site like this. I already know about the rel canonical tag, and rel next tag, but I'm not sure if either of these will do the job. Also, I don't want to lose potential links/link juice for good pages. Are there ways of using the "noindex" tag in batches? For instance: noindex all urls containing this character? Or do most CMS allow this to be done systematically? Anyone with experience doing SEO for a custom Social Network or Forum, please advise. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0