Dealing with duplicate content
-
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites.
What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms.
Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away.
Any thoughts?
-
Thanks Gerd, Marisa & Nakul. All good feedback. I asked this yesterday with another layer pertaining to mobile and I think it complicated the question too much for anyone to understand or answer.
product.com/shop is the ideal solution and that will require the investment in a new "product.com". Forgoing the SERP for buyproduct.com is likely the best option anyways considering it will be gone once investment is made.
Appreciate your responses.
-
I agree with Gerd and Marisa. I would recommend you to consider doing a Cross Domain canonical tag on your buyproduct.com product pages and any other duplicate content to your product.com pages or vice versa, depending upon whichever one you want to keep in the search engines.
Since both your websites have strength and our gaining the SERPS (which does not guarantee that they can't fall tomorrow for getting penalized for duplicate content), I would suggest you take the opportunity to put a plan and strategy together and get this taken care of sooner then later.
-
It seems as though combining the sites is your best option. If that is your long term goal, then spending countless time writing new content for one of them seems like a waste, especially if their rankings aren't suffering. However, that could change overnight, so I'd suggest to try to find a way to put combining them higher on your priority list. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but that is what I'd do if I were in your situation. I know you say it's not in your budget, but what's your budget going to look like if your site gets hit by the next Panda?
-
Are you able to change the domain of buyproduct.com to shop.product.com and then have the shop's product pages and content which is duplicate have the same canonical? Not ideal as your shop would not feature any content.
If you are able to rework buyproduct.com then I would change the product page structure, enrich with hproduct data and other relevant markup (reviews).
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
-
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?
I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products. Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site. Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?
Technical SEO | | znagle0 -
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 -
How do I get rid of duplicate content
I have a site that is new but I managed to get it to page one. Now when I scan it on SEO Moz I see that I have duplicate content. Ex: www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index and www.mysite.com/ How do I fix this without jeopardizing my SERPS ranking? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Press Releases & Duplicate Content
How do you do press releases without duplicating the content? I need to post it on my website along with having it on PR websites. But isn't that considered bad for SEO since it's duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | MercyCollege0 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
Duplicate Content -->?ss=facebook
Hi there, When searching site:mysite.com my keyword I found the "same page" twice in the SERP's. The URL's look like this: Page 1: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm Page 2: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm**?ss=facebook** The ?ss=facebook is caused by a bookmark button inserted in some of our product pages. My question is... will the canonical tag do to solve this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15565529539090