Am I doing enough to rid duplicate content?
-
I'm in the middle of a massive cleanup effort of old duplicate content on my site, but trying to make sure I'm doing enough.
My main concern now is a large group of landing pages. For example:
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/executive-suites/dallas
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/medical-space/dallas
And these are just the tip of the iceberg. For now, I've put canonical tags on each sub-page to direct to the main market page (the second two both point to the first, http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas for example). However this situation is in many other cities as well, and each has a main page like the first one above. For instance:
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/atlanta
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago
http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston
Obviously the previous SEO was pretty heavy-handed with all of these, but my question for now is should I even bother with canonical tags for all of the sub-pages to the main pages (medical-space or executive-suites to office-space), or is the presence of all these pages problematic in itself? In other words, should http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago and http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston and all the others have canonical tags pointing to just one page, or should a lot of these simply be deleted?
I'm continually finding more and more sub-pages that have used the same template, so I'm just not sure the best way to handle all of them. Looking back historically in Analytics, it appears many of these did drive significant organic traffic in the past, so I'm going to have a tough time justifying deleting a lot of them.
Any advice?
-
Heather,
I'm confused as to what the duplicate content is. The three Dallas pages you mentioned have different content. Sure there's a decent amount that's the same from the site-wide content (nav menus, etc.), but each has different text and information about different locations that are available. How is it duplicate?
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Heather,
First things: 1. Are they still driving traffic? 2. Rel=canonicals are supposed to be used on identical pages or on a page whose content is a subset of the canonical version.
Those pages are very thin content and I certainly wouldn't leave them as they are. If they're still driving content, I'd keep them, but for fear of panda, I'd 302 them to the main pages while I work steadily on putting real content on them and then remove the redirects as the content goes on.
If they're not still driving traffic, it seems to me that it wouldn't be very hard to justifying their removal (or 301 redirection to their main pages). Panda is a tough penalty and you don't want to get caught in that.
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
-
Does changing text content on a site affects seo?
HI, i have changed some h1 and h2 , changed and added paragraphs,fixed plagiarism,grammar and added some pics with alt text, I have just done it today, I am ranking on second page QUESTION-1 is it gonna affect my 2 months SEO efforts? QUESTION -2 Do I have to submit sitemap to google again? QUESTION-3 does changing content on the site frequently hurts SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
If I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by google to be a mixed content page?
With Google starting to crack down on mixed content I was wondering, if I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by Google to be a mixed content page? e.g. In an old blog article, there are images that weren't updated when the blog migrated to https, but just 301ed to new https images. is it still considered a mixed content page?
Algorithm Updates | | David-Stern0 -
Google & Tabbed Content
Hi I wondered if anyone had a case study or more info on how Google treats content under tabs? We have an ecommerce site & I know it is common to put product content under tabs, but will Google ignore this? Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey1 -
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
Test site is live on Google but it duplicates existing site...
Hello - my developer has just put a test site up on Google which duplicates my existing site (main url is www.mydomain.com and he's put it up on www.mydomain.com/test/ "...I’ve added /test/ to the disallowed urls in robots.txt" is how he put it. So all the site URLs are content replicated and live on Google with /test/ added so he can block them in robots. In all other ways the test site duplicates all content, etc (until I get around to making some tweaks next week, that is). Is this a bad idea or should I be OK. Last thing I want is a duplicate content or some other Google penalty just because I'm tweaking an existing website! Thanks in advance, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Do images count as duplicate content.
Hi We have a site called buypropertyanywhere. We sell properties all over the world but at times we use the same images of complexes. Would Google see this as copying from each other therefore duplicate content. Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | Feily0 -
Need help with some duplicate content.
I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was. It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this: http://noahsdad.com/resources/ http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/ http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/ I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category. What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed." There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories. Any ideas what I should do? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Is this the best way to get rid of low quality content?
Hi there, after getting hit by the Panda bear (30% loss in traffic) I've been researching ways to get rid of low quality content. From what I could find the best advise seemed to be a recommendation to use google analytics to find your worst performing pages (go to traffic sources - google organic - view by landing page). Any page that hasn't been viewed more than 100 times in 18 months should be a candidate for a deletion. Out of over 5000 pages and using this report we identified over 3000 low quality pages which I've begun exporting to excel for further examination. However, starting with the worst pages (according to analytics) I'm noticing some of our most popular pages are showing up here. For example: /countries/Panama is showing up as zero views but the correct version (with the end slash) countries/Panama/ is showing up as having over 600 views. I'm not sure how google even found the former version of the link but I'm even less sure how to proceed now (the webmaster was going to put a no-follow on any crap pages but this is now making him nervous about the whole process). Some advise on how to proceed from here would be fantastico and danke <colgroup><col width="493"></colgroup>
Algorithm Updates | | BrianYork-AIM0