No-index pages with duplicate content?
-
Hello,
I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers.
It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have.
Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages?
Thanks a lot for your help!
-
We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten.
So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.
-
Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter. Deindexing will ensure that they never rank, leave them indexed and they have a chance of ranking, worst case scenario is they don't rank well because of it.
-
I think Devanur gives some good advice regarding the gradual improvement of the content, though you're stuck in a bit of a catch-22 with regard to how Google views websites: You want to be able to sell lots of products, but don't have the resources for your company present them in a unique or engaging fashion. This is something that Google wants webmasters to do, but the reality of your situation paints a completely different picture of what will give your company decent ROI for updating vast amounts of product content.
If there isn't an obvious Panda problem, I wouldn't just noindex lots of pages without some thought and planning first. Before noindexing the pages I would look at what SEO traffic they're getting. noindexing alone seems like a tried and tested method of bypassing potential Panda penalties and although PageRank will still be passed, there's a chance that you are going to remove pages from the index that are driving traffic (even if it's long tail).
In addition to prioritising content production for indexed pages per Devanur's advice, I would also do some keyword analysis and prioritise the production of new content for terms which people are actually searching for before they purchase.
There's a Moz discussion here which might help you: http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery.
Regards
George
@methodicalweb
-
Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.
Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:
Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:
1. First, will make the top pages unique.
2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.
3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.
4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.
It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.
-
Hello,
Like I said in my first post, this has already been done. I was asking a specific question.
on another topic, 300 quality pages of content is not possible in the month. We're talking about articles that take at least an hour to write.
That being said, I'll ask my question again: once I have done, let's say, 750 pages of unique content, should I no-index the rest or not. is there something better to do that doesn't involve writing content for 20 000 pages?
Thanks.
-
Very true my friend. If you look at your top pages for last 30 days, there won't be more than 2000 approximately. So you can make the content unique on these over a period of six months or a bit more going at 300 per month. Trust me, this would be an effort well spent.
-
Hello,
I agree with you that it would be the best but like Isaid, writting content for 20 000 pages is not an option. Thanks for your answer!
-
Going off of what Devanur said. Giving your product pages unique content is the way to go. But this can include pictures, sizes, material and etc... I am in the rug business and this is how we pull it off and also how RugsUSA does as well. If you do not however, I would do what Devanur referred to with changing descriptions of your top selling products first.
All the best!
-
Hi,
While its not recommended to have duplicate content on your pages that is found else where, it is also not a good thing to de-index pages from Google. If I were you, I would have tried to beef-up these duplicate pages a little bit with unique content or at least rewritten the existing content so that it becomes unique.
Please go ahead and initiate the task of rewriting the product descriptions in phases starting with the ones that get the most traffic as per your web analytics data. Those were my two cents my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content. If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81 -
Duplicate URL home page
I just got a duplicate URL error on by SEOMOZ report - and I wonder if I should worry about it Assume my site is named www.widgets.com I'm getting duplicate url from http://www.widgets.com & http://www.widgets.com/ Do the search engines really see this as different on the home page? The general drift on the web is that You site should look like Home page = http://www.widgets.com And subpages http://www.widgets.com/widget1/ Of course it seems as though the IIS7 slash tool will rewrite everything Including the home page to a slash.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Removing pages from index
Hello, I run an e-commerce website. I just realized that Google has "pagination" pages in the index which should not be there. In fact, I have no idea how they got there. For example, www.mydomain.com/category-name.asp?page=3434532
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexGop
There are hundreds of these pages in the index. There are no links to these pages on the website, so I am assuming someone is trying to ruin my rankings by linking to the pages that do not exist. The page content displays category information with no products. I realize that its a flaw in design, and I am working on fixing it (301 none existent pages). Meanwhile, I am not sure if I should request removal of these pages. If so, what is the best way to request bulk removal. Also, should I 301, 404 or 410 these pages? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Alex0