Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
-
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage.
The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages.
While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page?
Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary?
My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely?
Hope this makes sense, thanks!
-
Thanks for the responses guys.
We were going to just have a unisex version of these pages located on the female sections and have the links on the male part redirect there, but our designer thought this would break the customer process up too much as once on those pages, the only way back to where they were (the male part) would be to click the back bottom on the browser as simply clicking to return home would take them to the home of the female part.
I'll make them canonical them - cheers!
-
I don't agree that much Adam about the useless nature of the About Us page. It's in that page that a company usually share its Why.
Said that... treat all these pages as "unisex". With that I mean: create just one page with an unique URLs and use it both for the woman version of the site and the male one.
If that is not possible, use the rel="canonical" choosing one URL as the canonical one.
-
As Matt said, boilerplate stuff is a tossup but your about page should be rankable for some unique facet of your business and for that reason, I'd be sure to 301 (if the pages are different) or canonicalize (if the page content is the same) to your preferred version.
-
In all honesty people worry far too much about the duplicate content rule. Duplicate content is primarily for content sites and only penalized on a large scale.
In your case not only is the about page one that you likely aren't hoping to get ranked, but it's such a small factor that I doubt it will come into play.
Your inbound marketing strategy is likely to be much more than SEO traffic in fact I'd be willing to bed that a good 60%+ of your traffic is direct and/or social. In such a case as long as users are able to find the information they need on the site (and ultimately convert to bookings keeping the end-client happy and cash flowing) then I wouldn't worry about the "About Us" page.
Remember two things:
1. Put the customer experience first and everything else is gravy.
2. A good business (and good marketing) is a bigger picture than just SEO these days. Focus on what traffic origin makes sense for you and make sure they can access the information they need.
Here's what Matt Cutts had to say on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459
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 'meta title' issue (AMP & NON-AMP Pages)
how to fix duplicate meta title issue in amp and non-amp pages? example.com
On-Page Optimization | | 21centuryweb
example.com/amp We have set the 'meta title' in desktop version & we don't want to change the title for AMP page as we have more than 10K pages on the website. ----As per SEMRUSH Tool---- ABOUT THIS ISSUE It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title>and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.</p> <p><strong>HOW TO FIX IT</strong></p> <p>Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags.<br /><br />this is what they are recommending, for the above issue we have asked our team to create unique meta and post title for desktop version but what about AMP page?<br /><br />Please help!</p></title>0 -
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Should we add our company's name in page title tag or not?
We have been adding our company (Townscript) name in all the page titles. For example, in an event page of Lucknow Conclave: www.townscript.com/lucknowconclave the page title is Lucknow Conclave | Alexis Society | Townscript I read somewhere that it's not necessary to put your company's name in the title tag. Is it right? Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | sanchitmalik0 -
Duplicate Content - What can be duplicate in two different product pages.
I am having a hard time understanding how my 3 different product pages are being shown up as Duplicate Content in s crawl. Some of my 21 different pages are being shown as duplicate content. Here are 3 of those: 1. http://champu.in/korn-rock-band-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 2. http://champu.in/stop-the-burning-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 3. http://champu.in/funny-t-shirts/absolut-punjabi-red-men-s-round-neck-t-shirt Can someone help me with this. Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | sidjain4you0 -
Using a lightbox - possible duplicate content issues
Redesigning website in Wordpress and going to use the following lightbox plug-in http://www.pedrolamas.pt/projectos/jquery-lightbox/ Naming the original images that appear on screen as say 'sweets.jpg'
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C
and the bigger version of the images as 'sweets-large.jpg' Alt text wise I would give both versions of the images slightly different descriptions. Do you think there would be any duplicate content issues with this? Anything I should do differently? I'm very wary of doing anything that Google is likely to think is naughty, so want to stay on their good side! Cheers
T0 -
How to avoid duplicates when URL and content changes during the course of a day?
I'm currently facing the following challenge: Newspaper industry: the content and title of some (featured) articles change a couple of times during a normal day. The CMS is setup so each article can be found by only using it's specific id (eg. domain.tld/123). A normal article looks like this: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-topic,123 Now the article gets changed and with it the topic. It looks like this now: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-new-topic,123 I can not tell the writers that they can not change the article as they wish any more. I could implement canonicals pointing to the short url (domain.tld/123). I could try to change the URL's to something like domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/123. Then we would lose keywords in URL (which afaik is not that important as a ranking factor; rather as a CTR factor). If anyone has experiences sharing them would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jan
On-Page Optimization | | jmueller0 -
Duplicate content and the Moz bot
Hi Does our little friend at SEOmoz follow the same rules as the search engine bots when he crawls my site? He has sent thousands of errors back to me with duplicate content issues, but I thought I had removed these with nofollow etc. Can you advise please.
On-Page Optimization | | JamieHibbert0 -
Urgent, Duplicate page title and content at eCommerce site- how to solve
Hi, there, does anyone can help to solve 'duplicate page title, duplicate page content' problem? it is a eCommerce site, each categories has hundreds of products, so there are more than 10 pages, but the report crawl the errors, i totally have no idea, can anyone help? Thanks a lot! Anna
On-Page Optimization | | anna-2944510