Duplicate Page Content on pages that appear to be different?
-
Hi Everyone! My name's Ross, and I work at CHARGED.fm. I worked with Luke, who has asked quite a few questions here, but he has since moved on to a new adventure. So I am trying to step into his role. I am very much a beginner in SEO, so I'm trying to learn a lot of this on the fly, and bear with me if this is something simple.
In our latest MOZ Crawl, over 28K high priority issues were detected, and they are all Duplicate Page Content issues. However, when looking at the issues laid out, the examples that it gives for "Duplicate URLs" under each individual issue appear to be completely different pages. They have different page titles, different descriptions, etc. Here's an example.
For "LPGA Tickets", it is giving 19 Duplicate URLs. Here are a couple it lists when you expand those:
http://www.charged.fm/one-thousand-one-nights-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/trash-inferno-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/mylan-wtt-smash-hits-tickets
http://www.charged.fm/mickey-thomas-ticketsInternally, one reason we thought this might be happening is that even though the pages themselves are different, the structure is completely similar, especially if there are no events listed or if there isn't any content in the News/About sections. We are going to try and noindex pages that don't have events/new content on them as a temporary fix, but is there possibly a different underlying issue somewhere that would cause all of these duplicate page content issues to begin appearing?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
Nothing will positively effect this issue more than updating the content and giving the searchers solid, informative, unique content to read.
One way to do that might be to aggregate some reviews for these individual shows, give a short, unique bio of the performers, or rate the venues. 500-800 words of unique content will go a long way in this case.
Something else to work on would be the amount of internal links back and forth. When links are all robot sees, that becomes your duplicate content issue too. You can't do too much about that in this case. Most of the links come from the nav bars, so, the way to counter it would be again, adding great content.
-
Well, if it were one of my clients sites… I wouldn't do that. While I understand your logic with a noindex, I wouldn't want to create a situation where the pages would not be about to be found at all in search engines. Although it will drop your duplicate content numbers here on Moz, it's only a temporary fix. I guess a good question to explore is how long you will need to keep them as a noindex versus how long it would take to fix the content issues.
-
Hey Adam!
thanks for the response, that kind of confirms what we were thinking. So we are planning to put in a noindex follow on those pages while we work on adjusting the content/descriptions. Is that a good fix while we work on the pages or is there something else we should be doing?
-
Hey Ross!
Those pages are not "different" when it comes to search engines. Or maybe I should say, not different enough. The content is extremely thin and only switching out a word or two will absolutely make them come up as duplicate content. I would strongly suggest optimizing the page content and meta descriptions to be unique.
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
-
Why am I ranking high for a keyword that is nowhere on my page?
There is a specific keyword phrase that I am ranking in the top 10 search results for. When I run page optimizer in Moz, my page is given a score of 73 and I'm predictably told I need to include this keyword somewhere on the page. This specific keyword phrase is not included anywhere on the page - not in image files, image alts, anchor text from inbound links (that I can find), text content, meta-titles or descriptions - it's nowhere. Meanwhile, a keyword phrase which Moz' page optimizer tells us we are scored 96 for we aren't even in the first three pages of search results for. What's going on here? On the surface, this seems to be telling me the Moz page optimizer is kinda...broken? Why am I ranking in the top 10 for a keyword phrase nowhere on my page? Thanks in advance for any help.
Moz Pro | | Closetstogo0 -
Duplicate Site Content found in Moz; Have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools
Hey, So on our site we have a Buyer's Guide that we made. Essentially it is a pop-up with a series of questions that then recommends a product. The parameter ?openguide=true can be used on any url on our site to pull this buyer's guide up. Somehow the Moz Site Crawl reported each one of our pages as duplicate content as it added this string (?openguide=true) to each page. We already have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools as openguide ; however, I am now worried that google might be seeing this duplicate content as well. I have checked all of the pages with duplicate title tags in the Webmaster Tools to see if that could give me an answer as to whether it is detecting duplicate content. I did not find any duplicate title tag pages that were because of the openguide parameter. I am just wondering if anyone knows:
Moz Pro | | MitchellChapman
1. a way to check if google is seeing it as duplicate content
2. make sure that the parameter is set correctly in webmaster tools
3. or a better way to prevent the crawler from thinking this is duplicate content Any help is appreciated! Thanks, Mitchell Chapman
www.kontrolfreek.com0 -
What's more valuable: new content or optimizing old content
We are a niche legacy print publication that's been around for close to 20 years. Recently, we combined several old sites in one new responsive site. We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed. Most of the old pieces although published, have not been optimized for SEO. However, as we create new pieces, we optimize them for search and social and they tend to get more organic traffic. Where we're torn is on how much we should balance our limited editorial resources between cleaning up and optimizing our extensive archive to improve our organic reach, vs. pumping out new original pieces each week. I realize that without a lot of data the answers will be varied - I guess I'm looking for a best practices approach for content publishers. If it helps at all, our main conversion goal is selling subscriptions to our print and digital publications. We know that organic traffic tends to be more engaged than our social referrals. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the magazine fulfilment business, it's tough to know which channels convert better. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | RicardoSalcedo0 -
Duplicate Content for Default Document Domains
I've noticed recently that within the Moz Crawl Report I keep seeing duplicate content for one of our pages that pulls from a default document. The pages are product pages, one ending in releases/ and the other ending in releases/index and are both identical pages. Normally in these situations I would prefer to make sure that every link is being sent to the releases/ page, however according to Moz, the releases/index page is actually ranking better and has a higher internal link count. Can someone advise me on the best way to deal with this situation? Hopefully I've explained myself well enough! Thanks Sam
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate Content, Canonicalization may not work in our scenario.
I'm new to SEO (so please excuse the lack of terminology), and will be taking over our companies inbound marketing completely, I previously just did data analysis and managed our PPC campaigns within Google and Bing/Yahoo, now I get all three, Yipee! But I digress. Before I get started here, I did read: http://moz.com/community/q/new-client-wants-to-keep-duplicate-content-targeting-different-cities?sort=most_helpful and I found both the answers there to be helpful, but indirect for my scenario. I'm conducting our companies first real SEO audit (thanks MOZ for the guide there), and duplicate content is going to be our number one problem to tackle. Our companies website was designed back in 2009, with the file structure /city-name/product-name. The problem with this is, we are open in over 50 cities now (and headed to 100 fast), and we are starting to amass duplicate content. Five products (and expanding), times the locations... you get it. My Question(s): How should I deal with this? The pages are almost identical, except listing the different information for each product depending upon it's location. However, for one of our products, Moz's own tools (PRO) did not find all the duplicate content, but did find some (I'm assuming it's because the pages have different course options and the address for the course is different, boils down to a different address on the very bottom of the body and different course options on the right sidebar). The other four products duplicate content were found and marked extensively. If I choose to use Canonicalization to link all the pages to one main page, I believe that would pass all the link juice to that one page, but we would no longer show in a Google search for the other cities, ex: washington DC example product name. Correct me if I'm wrong here. **Should I worry about the product who's duplicate content only was marked four times out of fifty cities? **I feel as if this question answers itself, but I still would like to have someone who knows more than me shed some light on this issue. The other four products are not going to be an issue as they are only offered online, but still follow the same file structure with /online in place of /city-name. These will be Canonicalized together under the /online location. One last thing I will mention here, having the city name in the url gives us a nice advantage (I think) when people are searching for products in cities we offer our product. (correct me again) If this is not the case, I believe I could talk our team into restructuring the files (if you think that's our best option). Some things you need to know about our site: We use a cookie for the location. Once you land on a page that has a location tied to it, the cookie is updated and saved. If the location does not exist, then you are redirected to a page to chose a location. I'm pretty sure this can cause some SEO issues too, but once again not sure. I know this is a wall of text, but I cannot tell you enough how appreciative I am in advance for your informative answers. Thanks a million, Trenton
Moz Pro | | PM_Academy0 -
Duplicate Page Content
i getting crewl errors on Duplicate Page Title and content for the same page. www.breeze-air.com www.breeze-air.com/ www.breeze-air.com/index-html what am i doing worng? please help thank you
Moz Pro | | eoberlender0 -
How do I scan down to 10000 pages?
Hi very new here I have set up 5 campaigns, all of fairly large sites. It appears seomoz has scanned 4 of them down to 250 and 1 down to 10000. the one a really want to see down to 10000, my own site is the one I started scanning first well over a week ago. How do I get seomoz to scan further? Thanks
Moz Pro | | First-VehicleLeasing0 -
Why do pages with canonical urls show in my report as a "Duplicate Page Title"?
eg: Page One
Moz Pro | | DPSSeomonkey
<title>Page one</title>
No canonical url Page Two
<title>Page one</title> Page two is counted as being a page with a duplicate page title.
Shouldn't it be excluded?0