Duplicate content issue
-
Hello! We have a lot of duplicate content issues on our website. Most of the pages with these issues are dictionary pages (about 1200 of them). They're not exactly duplicate, but they contain a different word with a translation, picture and audio pronunciation (example http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas). What's the better way of solving this? We probably shouldn't disallow dictionary pages in robots.txt, right?
Thanks!
-
No problem!
-
Thanks for the help!
-
Adding nofollow to links that point to dictionary pages will prevent search engines from getting there, but since the pages are in the index (and you don't want to change that) you're still facing the duplicate content issue.
I know it's a huge project to take on to add content to these pages, but it seems as though it's your only option. Perhaps you could split the project up between a few people and each update one page per day. That way it doesn't turn into a major time-suck.
-
Got it. We actually have plenty of organic entrances to these pages. So rel=canonical is not an option here.
And one more thing. Does it make sense to add nofollow links internally to main dictionary page(http://anglu24.lt/zodynas)? What are downsides of that? Or the negative effect might be similar to rel=canonical in our case?
-
You can do that, but you should check Google Analytics to see how many organic entrances you get to these dictionary pages first. If a lot of people enter your site that way, rel=canonical is going to hurt your traffic numbers significantly. For example, when you add a canonical tag to this page (http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas) that points elsewhere, the suitcase page is going to get dropped from the index.
-
Thanks for the suggestion. Adding more content is the perfect way to deal with this. The downside for us is that we unfortunately don't have resources at the time to make such upgrades to 1000+ pages.
What about using rel=canonical? Is it possible to choose one dictionary page to be the original, and to tell Google that all the other ones are similar thus avoiding possible penalties? How would this work?
-
The ideal situation would be to create more unique content on these pages. You're getting duplicate errors because more than 90% of the source code on the dictionary pages is a match. When you consider the header and footer, and the other code for the template, it's the same everywhere. The dictionary pages are very thin on content, so it's not enough to differentiate. If you can, build out the content more.
Here's a few ways you might add more content to each dictionary page:
- Include a sentence (or 2) for in-context example of each word
- Game-ify it by writing a short paragraph of text where the translated word is blank and the user has to choose from a set of answers
- Add the phonetics for how to pronounce each word
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
-
Possible duplicate content issue
Hi, Here is a rather detailed overview of our problem, any feedback / suggestions is most welcome. We currently have 6 sites targeting the various markets (countries) we operate in all websites are on one wordpress install but are separate sites in a multisite network, content and structure is pretty much the same barring a few regional differences. The UK site has held a pretty strong position in search engines the past few years. Here is where we have the problem. Our strongest page (from an organic point of view) has dropped off the search results completely for Google.co.uk, we've picked this up through a drop in search visibility in SEMRush, and confirmed this by looking at our organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics and Search Analytics in Search Console. Here are a few of the assumptions we've made and things we've checked: Checked for any Crawl or technical issues, nothing serious found Bad backlinks, no new spammy backlinks Geotarggetting, this was fine for the UK site, however the US site a .com (not a cctld) was not set to the US (we suspect this to be the issue, but more below) On-site issues, nothing wrong here - the page was edited recently which coincided with the drop in traffic (more below), but these changes did not impact things such as title, h1, url or body content - we replaced some call to action blocks from a custom one to one that was built into the framework (Div) Manual or algorithmic penalties: Nothing reported by search console HTTPs change: We did transition over to http at the start of june. The sites are not too big (around 6K pages) and all redirects were put in place. Here is what we suspect has happened, the https change triggered google to re-crawl and reindex the whole site (we anticipated this), during this process, an edit was made to the key page, and through some technical fault the page title was changed to match the US version of the page, and because geotargetting was not turned on for the US site, Google filtered out the duplicate content page on the UK site, there by dropping it off the index. What further contributes to this theory is that a search of Google.co.uk returns the US version of the page. With country targeting on (ie only return pages from the UK) that UK version of the page is not returned. Also a site: query from google.co.uk DOES return the Uk version of that page, but with the old US title. All these factors leads me to believe that its a duplicate content filter issue due to incorrect geo-targetting - what does surprise me is that the co.uk site has much more search equity than the US site, so it was odd that it choose to filter out the UK version of the page. What we have done to counter this is as follows: Turned on Geo targeting for US site Ensured that the title of the UK page says UK and not US Edited both pages to trigger a last modified date and so the 2 pages share less similarities Recreated a site map and resubmitted to Google Re-crawled and requested a re-index of the whole site Fixed a few of the smaller issues If our theory is right and our actions do help, I believe its now a waiting game for Google to re-crawl and reindex. Unfortunately, Search Console is still only showing data from a few days ago, so its hard to tell if there has been any changes in the index. I am happy to wait it out, but you can appreciate that some of snr management are very nervous given the impact of loosing this page and are keen to get a second opinion on the matter. Does the Moz Community have any further ideas or insights on how we can speed up the indexing of the site? Kind regards, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
3rd Party hosted whitepapers — bad idea? Duplicate content?
It is common the B2B world to have 3rd parties host your whitepapers for added exposure. Is this a bad practice from an SEO point of view? Is the expectation that the 3rd parties use rel=canonical tags? I doubt most of them do . . .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate page content query
Hi forum, For some reason I have recently received a large increase in my Duplicate Page Content issues. Currently it says I have over 7,000 duplicate page content errors! For example it says: Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/gowns/news.html http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/news.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sterls
http://dikelli.com.au/gallery/dikelli/gowns/gowns/sale_gowns.html However there are no physical links to any of these page on my site and even when I look at my FTP files (I am using Dreamweaver) these directories and files do not exist. Can anyone please tell me why the SEOMOZ crawl is coming up with these errors and how to solve them?0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Load balancing - duplicate content?
Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site. My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be. The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems. Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0