Replacing text with images

[ThinkingJuice]

Hello,

My client is a "cheap calls" site which is offering calls to around 300 countries in the world. The pages for each country are almost the same, as they are mostly terms and conditions of making a call and explanation of the process how to do it. The copy is quite long (more than 850 words) and the country name is repeated about 26 times in the text. The country name and the phone number is the main difference between the pages, which makes them almost the same. I have recommended to add testimonials to each country and towns within the country, but I am afraid it will not dilute the similarity between the pages enough for Google to stop seeing them as duplicated. Also the client do not exactly rush to publish the testimonials for every country.

The rankings are not too bad and all seems fine, but in the long term I know we need to do something. I am not sure if the client would agree to shorten up the copy, as they believe in old style seo with keyword stuffing and bolded keywords but I would like to overcome that problem with exchanging the most of the copy with an image. I would write a new copy for each page making it unique (around 2-3 paragraphs) and the rest would be an image stating exactly the same thing as the copy now to provide the same amount of info to the user.

Theoretically it should help to resolve this problem, but would like to check if anyone has done something like that and if it worked/may work. Are they any other implications?

[Everett]

Adrian,

You are on the right track and are trying your best to advise this client with SEO best practices. Pat yourself on the back for that one.

I've had this similar situation a few times and instead of using an image I used either an iFrame or a script. An image might work as well. This is not spammy or blackhat or anything like that. It is quite common for site-wide text like terms of service, privacy policy, FAQ, shipping policy, etc... to be shown on every page of a site in this manner. It is especially common on eCommerce sites with regard to shipping, return policy... No matter what just make sure it is all viewable from the major mobile devices.

An easy way to test things out is to just choose a few location pages, remove the boilerplate copy (replace it using the method of your choice), write your unique content and give it a few weeks/months to see how it competes in the SERPs. For better or worse this should give you the answer.

In the long-run, however, these doorway pages you described are obviously a bad idea so they should have a plan in place on what to do if when those pages fall from the rankings.

[AlanMosley]

You should read this to the website owners

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

[PaddyDisplays]

You really have one arm tied behind your back on this one.  I like the idea of the image as a solution, but I worry that might see it as "gaming" in some way as its an very unusual thing to do, especially if the image is very big.  Its hard to know without doing on some selected pages and see what happens.

I think you would be better off convincing your client that is  bad practice (maybe show him them comming up as dup error in the moz report).  Maybe he harsh with him, tell him he can keep the text as it is if he wants, but he will never rank with those pages.

[ThinkingJuice]

Thank you for your replies.

Taking aside making the site 1 pager, what do you think about the method of replacing the duplicated copy with the image. Would it work?

[AlanMosley]

Yes it may, but I thing you still need to beef up the unique content rather then just hide the duplicate content. may be explain to them, that a one page may rank well in all these towns, but Google  is going to look at these 1,000 page s and say we are only going to rank one of them and not very well.

[ThinkingJuice]

Hi Simon,

It is all in English and targets people in UK who wish to call different countries. It is not that site, but has the same problem http://www.bubblecall.co.uk/. Do you think hreflang would still be valid?

[ThinkingJuice]

I wish, but unfortunately i cannot see the client agreeing to turn 1000 pages site into a 1 page site. They create new pages for every town in each country and continents too adding duplications.

They also double these pages by doing not only "cheap calls" pages for towns, countries and continents but also "cheap phone card" pages for all of those.

I need to play with what I have got, so replacing duplicated text with image and adding unique paragraphs should help the problem. What do you think?

[simon_realbuzz]

If I understand your situation correctly then this could well be an opportunity to implement hreflang. This would ensure the correct version appears in search and you would avoid potential duplication issues. It doesn't matter if you content is in different languages or the same language with different countries being targeted, hreflang will be relevant.

Check out http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

[AlanMosley]

Maybe this should all be on one page that may rank well, turn a problem into a win

[ThinkingJuice]

Hi Alan

Thank you for your reply.

The case with this site is that it is targeting only UK based audience (cheap calls from UK to other countries), so every page is in English. If I create 300 tlds in English I will have duplicated content among 300 domains anyway:(

[PaddyDisplays]

I agree with Alan, just make sure you point the domains to the right targeted country in Webmaster tools.

[AlanMosley]

Maybe get some international tld domains. There is no problem with having a duplicate site if they are in different tlds