Duplicate Content - Reverse Phone Directory
-
Hi,
Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors.
Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position.
Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain.
I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
If I would be at your place I would have used the idea that you come up with... add user generated content but do check the GUC section you are adding it should not contain an iframe or else there will be no use of it.
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
-
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
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 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Worpress Tags Duplicate Content
I just fixed a tags duplicate content issue. I have noindexed the tags. Was wondering if anyone has ever fixed this issue and how long did it take you to recover from it? Just kind of want to know for a piece of mind.
Technical SEO | | deaddogdesign0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
E-Commerce Duplicate Content
Hello all We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL! 😞 Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc. I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential? I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects? Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow! Cheers Todd
Technical SEO | | toddyC0