Duplicate content due to numerous sub category level pages
-
We have a healthcare website which lists doctors based on their medical speciality. We have a paginated series to list hundreds of doctors.
Algorithm: A search for Dentist in Newark locality of New York gives a result filled with dentists from Newark followed by list of dentists in locations near by Newark. So all localities under a city have the same set of doctors distributed jumbled an distributed across multiple pages based on nearness to locality. When we don't have any dentists in Newark we populate results for near by localities and create a page.
The issue - So when the number of dentists in New York is <11 all Localities X Dentists will have jumbled up results all pointing to the same 10 doctors. The issue is even severe when we see that we have only 1-3 dentists in the city. Every locality page will be exactly the same as a city level page. We have about 2.5 Million pages with the above scenario.
**City level page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist - 5 dentists
**Locality Level Page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/clifton, https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/newark - Page contains the same 5 dentists as in New York city level page in jumbled up or same order.
What do you think we must do in such a case?
We had discussions on putting a noindex on locality level pages or to apply canonical pointing from locality level to city level. But we are still not 100% sure.
-
Hi ozil! Did Eric's answer help? We'd love an update.
-
You'll definitely want to take care of the duplicate content issue. Rather than using a noindex tag, we usually recommend using a canonical tag in this situation. If you're able to only show the canonical tag on pages that have fewer listings, that would be great.
Another option would be to always make sure you have a certain number of listings showing up. Perhaps in those cases where you only have a limited number of listings you can show listings from other cities in the area? I know in our area, I wouldn't have a problem traveling to another city in order to get the service (like a dentist) that I need.
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 -
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
Duplicate Page Content for www and non-www. Help!
Hi guys, having a bit of a tough time here... MOZ is reporting duplicate content for 21 pages on eagleplumbing.co.nz, however the reported duplicate is the www version of the page. For example: http://eagleplumbing.co.nz and http://www.eagleplumbing.co.nz are considered duplicates (see screenshot attached) Currently in search console I have just updated the non-www version to be set as the preferred version (I changed this back and forth twice today because I am confused!!!). Does anyone know what the correct course of action should be in this case? Things I have considered doing include: changing the preferred version to the www version in webmaster tools, setting up 301 redirects using a wordpress plugin called Eggplant 301 redirects. I have been doing some really awesome content creation and have created some good quality citations, so I think this is only thing that is eaffecting my rank. Any help would be greatly appreciated. view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | QRate0 -
Home Page Blog Snippets - Duplicate Content Help?
Afternoon Folks- I have been asked to contribute to a new site that has a blogfeed prominently displayed on the home page. It's laid out like this: Logo | Menu HOME PAGE SLIDER Blog 1 Title about 100 words of blog 1 Text Blog 2 Title about 100 words of blog 2 Text Blog 3 Title about 100 words of blog 3 Text Footer: -- This seems like an obvious duplicate content situation but also a way I have seen a lot of blogs laid out. (I.E. With blog content snippets being a significant portion of the home page content) I want the blogs to rank and I want the home page to rank, so I don't feel like a rel canonical on the blog post's is the correct option unless I have misunderstood their purpose. Anyone have any ideas or know how this is usually handled?
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
Video thumbnail pages with "sort" feature -- tons of duplicate content?
A client has 2 separate pages for video thumbnails. One page is "popular videos" with a sort function for over 700 pages of video thumbnails with 10 thumbnails and short desriptions per page. (/videos?sort_by=popularity). The second page is "latest videos" (/videos?sort_by=latest) with over 7,000 pages. Both pages have a sort function -- including latest, relevance, popularity, time uploaded, etc. Many of the same video thumbnails appear on both pages. Also, when you click a thumbnail you get a full video page and these pages appear to get indexed well. There seem to be duplicate content issues between the "popular" and "latest" pages, as well as within the sort results on each of those pages. (A unique URL is generated everytime you use the sort function i.e. /videos?sort_by=latest&uploaded=this_week). Before my head explodes, what is the best way to treat this? I was thinking a noindex,follow meta robot on every page of thumbnails since the individual video pages are well indexed, but that seems extreme. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
What's the difference between a category page and a content page
Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0