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.
Car Dealership website - Duplicate Page Content Issues
-
Hi,
I am currently working on a large car dealership website.
I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages.
How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same?
Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website?
Thank you.
-
I was referring to the navigation breadcrumbs that use can mark up with structured data. Like this: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs?hl=en
-
How would schema markup benefit the used-cars, can you do schema for these?
Sorry I haven't done much on schema markup.
-
I vote for #2. Having brand and model category pages with all the product listings can be more beneficial for SEO, and they can use breadcrumbs with schema markup, which will look nicely in the SERP.
-
brand
-
model 1
-
product 1
-
product 2
-
...
-
model 2
-
...
-
-
I suppose your top priority keywords are the head terms (e.g. used car) and brand related searches that are targeted by category pages, e.g. used mazda cx 5. The "duplicate" pages are the actual car pages that change on a daily basis, every time they sell or add a new car.
Your priorities are the head terms and category related searches, so having duplicate content on a few dozen mazda cx 5 pages shouldn't be an issue. The website duplicates product descriptions, not articles or blog posts and I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to understand the concept.
It's unlikely that the actual product pages will rank in Google, because they are changed too frequently and don't have time to build up page authority.
Make sure you don't have thousands of duplicate page titles, by using unique identifiers and even ID numbers in the page titles. E.g. Used [colour] [year] [brand] [model] [mileage]
Hope it helps.
-
At first let me quote what Matt Cutts says about duplicate content. "I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing"
So it won't harm your site. Now coming back to your question. To make it better, you can put different description (Car Condition or Dealer's Note ) for each car.
-
There are effectively 2 ways you could handle this properly:
- Consolidate all of those duplicate pages into one page; keeping these listings one a single page and using a gallery / ajax / etc. to bring up one specific car at a time.
- Choose one page from each set of duplicates as the base page, and place "rel-canonical" tags in the duplicates.
Option 2 is likely the better of the two in terms of SEO and your business, but both are technically viable options.
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Duplicate Content Issue WWW and Non WWW
One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.
Technical SEO | | Michael4g1 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Does 'framing' a website create duplicate content?
Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations. The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site. What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all. Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content? This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0