Will a GEO Localization site create thousands of duplicates?
-
Hi mozzers,
We are about to launch a new site and right now I am worried that this new site may create thousands of duplicate content which will harm all the SEO that has been done in the last few years.
Here is a situation:
You land on the example.com/Los-angeles page (geo located) but if you modify URI to example.com/chico then a pop up appears and ask you for the location you want to be in (pop up attached). When choosing chico the URI switches to example.com/chico?franchise=chico instead of /chico only. This site has over 40 different microsites so my question are all these arguments ?franchise=city going to be indexed and create thousands of dups? or are we safe because this geo localization happens thanks to javascript?
Thanks!
-
For the most part I'm going to restrict my answer to the technical part of your question but do have a think about whether the pages are actually duplicates. If they represent different franchises of companies then they may well be relevant content pages. Think in terms of resources.
You can't assume the query string will remain undiscovered by Google. It only takes someone linking with the query string attached for it to be found. Over time many of the near-duplicates may be discovered in this way. You can instruct Google on how to handle URL parameters.
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
-
Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
Hi there, We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one. We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense. Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Duplicate
Is it harmful to have two of these which are identical in the section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
Hi Mozzers - We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load. Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done. So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Duplicate or not ?
Hello, I have an ecommerce website with products I have many categories and more products are associated with several categories (I can not do otherwise). Urls of each product are not duplicated because I have : http://www.site.com/product-name However, my breadcrumb varies depending on the way. I have for example: If I go through the A section and sub-section Aa, my breadcrumb will:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon
Home> Section A> subheading Aa> product 1 If >> I go through the B section and sub-section Ca, my breadcrumb will:
Home> Section B> subheading Ca> product 1 My question: is that with only a breadcrumb different for my product sheets, there is a duplication? My opinion ...... not because the url of the page is unique. Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for the english, i'm french 😉 D.0 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Penalized for duplication?
Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate content for swatches
My site is showing a lot of duplicate content on SEOmoz. I have discovered it is because the site has a lot of swatches (colors for laminate) within iframes. Those iframes have all the same content except for the actual swatch image and the title of the swatch. For example, these are two of the links that are showing up with duplicate content: http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=3691&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=204&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= I do want each individual swatch to show up in search results and they currently are if you search for the exact swatch name. Is the fact that they all have duplicate content affecting my individual rankings and my domain authority? What can I do about it? I can't really afford to put unique content on each swatch page so is there another way to get around it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0