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.
-
You may or may not have issues, but the general consensus is that if you place the rel canonical tag to the mobile page you should be ok, perhaps try it on one or two pages and then leave it for a month or so and watch your ranking trends.....
Also you could try and ask this question on the G webmaster forum to try and get a reply from a G employee.
Best of luck for today and forevermore!
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 issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Duplicate page title at bottom of page - ok, or bad?
Can I get you experts opinion? A few years ago, we customized our pages to repeat the page title at the bottom of the page. So the page title is in the breadcrumbs at the top, and then it's also at the bottom of the page under all the contents. Here is a sample page: bit.ly/1pYyrUl I attached a screen shot and highlighted the second occurence of the page title. Am worried that this might be keyword stuffing, or over optimizing? Thoughts or advice on this? Thank you so much! ron ZH8xQX6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content. The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime 😉 ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit. Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 ! Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fammy0 -
Opinion on Duplicate Content Scenario
So there are 2 pest control companies owned by the same person - Sovereign and Southern. (The two companies serve different markets) They have two different website URLs, but the website code is actually all the same....the code is hosted in one place....it just uses an if/else structure with dynamic php which determines whether the user sees the Sovereign site or the Southern site....know what I am saying? Here are the two sites: www.sovereignpestcontrol.com and www.southernpestcontrol.com. This is a duplicate content SEO nightmare, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MeridianGroup0 -
Duplicate Content in News Section
Our clients site is in the hunting niche. According to webmaster tools there are over 32,000 indexed pages. In the new section that are 300-400 news posts where over the course of a about 5 years they manually copied relevant Press Releases from different state natural resources websites (ex. http://gfp.sd.gov/news/default.aspx). This content is relevant to the site visitors but it is not unique. We have since begun posting unique new posts but I am wondering if anything should be done with these old news posts that aren't unique? Should I use the rel="canonical tag or noindex tag for each of these pages? Or do you have another suggestion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rise10 -
Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Press Release and Duplicate Content
Hello folks, We have been using Press Releases to promote our clients business for a couple of years and we have seen great results in referral traffic and SEO wise. Recently one of our clients requested us to publish the PR on their website as well as blast it out using PRWeb and Marketwire. I think that this is not going to be a duplicate content issue for our client's website since I believe that Google can recognize which content has been published first, but I will be more than happy to get some of the Moz community opinions. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aviatech0