How can I have pages with media that changes and avoid duplicate content when the text stays the same?
-
I want to have a page that describes a specific property and/or product. The top part of the page has media options such as video and photos while the bottom includes the description.
I know I can set up the media in tabs and have it separated by javascript, but everything resides on one page so there are no duplicate content issues.
Example: http://www.worldclassproperties.com/properties/Woodside
BUT what if I need to the photos and the videos to have separate URLs so I can link to them individually? For example, for a real estate site blog, I may want to send visitors to the page of the home tour. I don't want to link them to the version of the page with the photos because I want them to arrive on the video portion.
Example: http://www.worldclassproperties.com/properties/Woodside?video=1
Is there any way to get around the problem that would result from the duplicate content of the product/property description? I do not have the resources in the budget to make two unique descriptions for every page.
-
You're welcome.
Yes, that's right. When it comes to catering for duplicate content issues, there will usually be a page (such as the one with the Canonical tag) that won't be best placed for search. Inbound links, for example, will be best pointed to the main page, such as your main Woodside page. This will be the page to focus the SEO on for that particular location.
Regards
Simon
-
Thank you.
So if I use the canonical tag to point the video page to the photos page, does that mean the video won't have much value for optimization since I'm telling the search engines to ignore the page it's on?
-
I know there are SEOs who will disagree with me, but I don't think duplicate content is quite the issue some people think it is. Yes, there is, perhaps, some dilution of internal link juice, but there is not a negative filter in Google's algorithm that counts against you if you have duplicate pages.
That said, would it work for you to use anchors on one page with a named anchor for the video for one URL and another for the photos?
-
Hi there,
A good question.
I'd suggest making use of the Canonical tag within your website, which would be a quick, easy & effective solution.
For example, on a page with duplicate content such as http://www.worldclassproperties.com/properties/Woodside?video=1 place a Canonical tag pointing to the primary/original page which is http://www.worldclassproperties.com/properties/Woodside
This would avoid those duplicate content penalties as you'd be in effect redirecting the search engines from your duplicate pages back to the main page.
The link above on Canonical tag is well worth a visit, a great explanation of Canonicals by Rand Fishkin.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
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 analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
Partial duplicate content (reviews) on product pages - is this ok?
Hello, we recently received some really good reviews about a range of products we sell (there are normally 8 products in a range). Due to the industry we are in it made no sense to try and get reviews on each individual product within the range as they differ only ever so slightly. So my question is we want to add these reviews to each of the 8 products that lie within each range, but by adding them it would mean that each page has around 600 words of unique product description followed by approx 600 words of reviews that are the same on each of the products within that range. Is this ok? my only other option would be to screenshot the reviews and upload them as images below each product description. If anyone could offer advice here that would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | livs20130 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Duplicate Title and Content. How to fix?
So this is the biggest error I have. But I don't know how to fix it. I get that I have to make it so that the duplicats redirect to the source, but I don't know how to do that. For example, this is out of our crawl diagnostic: | On The Block - Page 3 http://www.maddenstudents.com/forumdisplay.php?57-On-The-Block/page3 1 1 0 On The Block - Page 3 http://www.maddenstudents.com/forumdisplay.php?57-On-The-Block/page3&s=8d631e0ac09b7a462164132b60433f98 | 1 | 1 | 0 | That's just an example. But I have over 1000+ like that. How would I go about fixing that? Getting rid of the "&s=8d631e0ac09b7a462164132b60433f98"? I have godaddy as my domain and web hoster. Could they be able to fix it?
Technical SEO | | taychatha0 -
Duplicate Content
SEOmoz is reporting duplicate content for 2000 of my pages. For example, these are reported as duplicate content: http://curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158
Technical SEO | | jplill
http://curatorseye.com/Name=âHolster-Atlasâ---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 The actual link on the site is http://www.curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 Any insight on how to fix this? I'm not sure where the second version of the URL is coming from. Thanks,
Janet0 -
How to remove the duplicate page title
Hi everyone, I saw many posts related to this query.But i couldnt find a solution for my error.. Here is my question I got 575 Duplicate page title & 600 duplicate page content errors. My site is related to realestate. I created a page title like same sentence differs with locality name Eg: Land for sale - kandy property Land for sale - Galle property Likewise Locality name only differs..I have created meta title & Content like this. Can anyone let me know how to solve this error ASAP ?
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Chandran0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Htm vs. aspx page extensions & duplicate content
We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the URLs include keywords?
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0