What is the best way to deal with pages whose content changes?
-
My site features businesses that offers activities for kids. Each business has its own page on my site. Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities). Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps). The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty.
This is creating 2 problems. It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content.
What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts? Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content? Should I just ignore this problem? Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect?
Would love to know people's thoughts.
-
Excellent. That's what we'll probably end up doing. Egol and Alex, thanks for the responses.
-
You could have something about the success of past events? Maybe you could encourage the businesses to write something themselves as good promotion.
How about some permanent text about the business and/or events they run on the page? If there are no events - perhaps a brief explanation that there are none yet, along with some suggestions of other local businesses running events and/or a call-to-action to sign up for notifications?
I wouldn't noindex the page when there is no content.
-
Hey thanks for the reply. I should clarify that the listing page is just that -- a listing of upcoming events. A separate page features information about the business. The listings are database driven. Here is an example...
http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/13/juan-de-fuca-recreation-centre-victoria-bc/events/
-
If you write the content for these pages, get busy writing more.
If the featured businesses write the content you will need to find carrots, sticks or pink slips.
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 page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Advice on improve this content page for seo and google
Hi, i use joomla and i am looking for some help to find out what i should be doing to make my content pages better for seo and google. I would be grateful if people would look at the following page as an example http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/top-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s and let me know what i should be doing to make it better for seo and for google so people can find the page. I am using the above page as an example so i can learn from it. I would be grateful if people could look at the source code for the page to see if there is anything that should be in their that is not and if i should be looking at any joomla plugins for the content pages to improve the seo of the page. Any help to improve my seo for my content pages would be great. many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220 -
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.
Technical SEO | | WebsightDesign0 -
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