Reducing duplicate content
-
Callcatalog.com is a complaint directory for phone numbers. People post information on the phone calls they get. Since there are many many phone numbers, obviously people haven't posted information on ALL of the phone numbers, THUS I have many phone numbers with zero content. SEOMoz is telling me that pages with zero content looks like duplicate content with each other..
The only difference between two pages that have zero coments is the title and phone number embedded in the page. For example, http://www.callcatalog.com/phones/view/413-563-3263 is a page that has zero comments..
I don't want to remove these zero comment phone number pages from the directory since many people find the pages via a phone number search.
Here's my question: what can I do to make google / seomoz think that thexe zero comment pages is not dupliicate content?
-
no not at all. but i would not worrie, as there is little info on them they are not really going to do much for you, when they are filled in, they will no longer be duplicates.
If they only ave a phhone number and title, they are not going to do anythiung for you -
I think Joel Hit is right.
Still the pages are very similar but again, is not something you should be afraid of.
As far as improving bounce rate you should think about A/B testing.
A few things you can try:
-
add a [next] / [show another result] / [ not the number you are looking for ? ] button that should at least drop the BR.
-
add a side bar with additional navigation options that links internally
just a few ideas - hope it helps.
- play with the informational layout including your ads (adsesne)
-
-
ok, so if google still indexes it then they DO NOT consider it duplicate?
Lol. Good point. You are right !
-
ok, so if google still indexes it then they DO NOT consider it duplicate?
-
If you add a no index on those pages they won't show in the search results and lose the entire purpose - the effect will be the same with removing the pages.
People are getting on those pages for sure - probably a lot of people overall.
-
Eyepaq -- very interesting. Any additional thoughts as to how to improve bounce rate then?
-
I've seen stats form a similar website - I've never thought that so many people are looking for phone numbers - it's incredible.
Now getting to the point, in my personal opinion you should do nothing. Especially don't remove those pages as that's suicide.
Even if the SeoMoz tool is showing duplicate content issues on the site - duplicate content within your site is NEVER a penalty situation. You will never get in trouble for having the same content or similar content on more pages within your site.
The only down side is that duplicate pages will compete to each other in search results but in your case they won't as you are looking for a single keyword for each page (with or without comments on it - the exact phone number that is).
The main goal is to get to a page after looking for that particular phone number so in your case multiple pages from your site with similar content won't compete - you are safe from all points of view.
You should never remove the pages with no comments from the site as it will drop your organic # by a lot - I've seen stats from a similar website and, like in your case, only a few pages had comments/names and 90% were blank pages with the number in h1 on the top only and those pages received a lot of organic direct hits.
The bounce rate however was high - so you might want to give some extra options within that page beside the number and the form as this can even increase your adsense ctr if done with extra care. If you already have a lot of traffic I would suggest A/B testing for the empty pages.
-
if I added a no index meta tag, then wouldn't it not show up in the google search index? Google lists many of my no-content pages and people show up on them. Any other ideas?
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
-
Unsolved Next JS and Missing content
Hello
Moz Pro | | 4thWhale
We recently migrated our page to next JS which is supposed to be great for SEO
On almost all our pages we are getting the same errors Missing Canonical Tag Missing Title Missing or Invalid H1 Missing Description We don't understand this because we have all of that content on every page. We believe that maybe NextJs is having a incompatibility with Moz. Has anyone had any experience with this?0 -
Drupal 8 tags and categories cause duplicate content shown in MOZ
Hi all, There is something difficult to trace that is causing duplicate content that is related to categories and tags i.e. https://example.com/contact Associated Pages https://example.com/tags/business https://example.com/taxonomy/term/41 example 2 https://example.com/category/example-category-1 Associated Pages https://example.com/category/occupiers-liability example 3 https://example.com/tags/test https://example.com/tags/test-2 Above two pages display same content (maybe due to similar posts feature) My question here is: Is this caused by Drupal website misconfiguration (or one of its modules) since website uses similar posts feature or it's something else. Duplicate content for example.com/index.php issue has been solved by redirects. Should something similar be done in case of tags / categories? Any discussion / suggestions on that matter are greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Solved How to reduce the spam score for my domain?
My domain longfeifei.com is for a regular company website and someone sent a lot of external links on different low-quality websites on the internet. Now the score is very high about 75%. If I disavow the unusual links from google search console. Is it possible to reduce the spam score? Is MOZ associated with GOOGLE Data? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | niaokun6838071 -
My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?
Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it? This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion. Thank you. | |
Moz Pro | | dlmilli1 -
The pages that add robots as noindex will Crawl and marked as duplicate page content on seo moz ?
When we marked a page as noindex with robots like {<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noindex</a>" />} will crawl and marked as duplicate page content(Its already a duplicate page content within the site. ie, Two links pointing to the same page).So we are mentioning both the links no need to index on SE.But after we made this and crawl reports have no change like it tooks the duplicate with noindex marked pages too. Please help to solve this problem.
Moz Pro | | trixmediainc0 -
Crawl report - duplicate page title/content issue
When the crawl report is finished, it is saying that there are duplicate content/page titles issues. However there is a canonical tag that is formatted correctly so just wondered if this was a bug or if anyone else was having the same issues? For example, I'm getting a error warning for this page http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/categories/categories_travel?sort=name_asc&searchterm=&page=1&layout=table
Moz Pro | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title - Miva - How to fix?
Hi, I'm new to SEOmoz and just diving into it. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I use Miva Merchant as my storefront interface. SEMOz is returning a bunch of duplicate page content and duplicate page titles and I can't figure out what to do about it. It seems it may have something to do with Miva shortlinks. I click on the dup URL's in SEMOz and it brings me to a dead page. I can't figure out where it's coming from. I know without seeing the actual information it'll probably be tough to help me but any suggestions would be appreciated. I try to fix them and come to a point (after about three hours of getting nowhere) it becomes too frustrating. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | musicforkids
Gary0 -
Duplicate content & canonicals
Hi, Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries. The setup is like this: www.website.eu/nl
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
... You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch... The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages. Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa? Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?0