Unique Content Below Fold - Better Move Above Fold?
-
I have a page with a Google Map taking up 80% of space above the fold (rest is content which is not unique to my site) and all unique written content and copyrighted pictures are from a visual stand point right below the fold. I am considering making the Google map 1/4 in size so I can get my unique content up higher. Questions:
- Do we have any evidence or sound reasoning why I should / should not make this move?
- Is the content really considered below the fold or will Google see that it is simply a large map I have on the site and therefore will actually consider the content to be above the fold?
Thank you
-
Thx. I am going to make non unique pages "noindex, nofollow" and I am going to get rid of "rel=next prev". This keeping "follow" on noindex pages is so minor and I think might hurt my site since it allows Google to read what is on those pages....(non unique duplicate looking content).
I will update in a few months with the results.
-
Does my logic make sense?
I don't want to guess.
If this was my site, I would want that answer coming from someone who has seen a lot of real estate sites and knows how the most successful in highly competitive real estate markets handle this problem.
-
" lot of people think that noindexing duplicate content is "best practice"... but I am not sure that is true when you have a lot of duplicate content that is out there on a lot of other websites. Google is probably saying... "Oh no! Another one!"
If I add page 2 to n and specific property pages to robots.txt that would sent a stronger signal to Google and Google may not say "oh no, another one"?
Does my logic make sense?
-
Thx a lot. You really know your stuff. Maybe I should add those noindex pages to robots.txt instead and get rid of "rel=next prev" signals. Basically isolate page 1 as a stand alone page and in this way search engines do not see pages 2 to n with the "noindex, follow" tag.
-
Now that I see the site, I might understand why Google does not like it.
The community pages like the one that you gave as an example are signposts for a large number of noindex pages that mostly contain content that can be seen verbatim on many other websites. A lot of people think that noindexing duplicate content is "best practice"... but I am not sure that is true when you have a lot of duplicate content that is out there on a lot of other websites. Google is probably saying... "Oh no! Another one!"
After seeing, I agree with you that the map is way oversized. But I don't think that changing it is going to solve your problem.
I can't tell you how to solve your problem. I think that real estate is tough because the content changes rapidly and lots and lots of websites are publishing the same stuff. So, if this site belonged to me I would find an SEO consultant with deep experience in working on successful real estate sites in highly competitive markets who can study the site and give me advice.
Good luck.
-
I have added "noindex, follow" on page 2 to n as well. View all not possible. I only index pages where I have unique quality content added. Therefore, I also have many similar pages where page 1 is also "noindex, follow" and all property pages noindex, follow.
I have basically done everything to only index high quality pages and none of the MLS pages that look like on 100+ other real estate websites...
-
Thx very much. Ex: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/
As you will see, I have lots of quality unique content below the fold and all pictures in slideshow below the fold are my original photos. My pages are higher quality than any competitor but do not rank. I suspect a reason is the unique content is below the fold. I do understand link profile still isn't strong (9 month old site) but the link profile is still relative to many competitors strong.
Idea I am playing with is to reduce map to 1/4 the size (chop 75% off) and place unique content higher.
Your opinion would be highly appreciated.
-
I have LOTS of pages with a nice Google map, wonderful photo, interesting graph hogging the above-the-fold space.
I am not changin' anything.
If you have great stuff, one of the best presentations of your subject, above the fold and people are responding well to it then don't let kibitzers spreadin' rumors about "above the fold" content tanking your rankings scare you away from it.
I am out every day looking for, spending lots of money on, consulting with my photographer.... to get great face-slapping content to post above the fold to impress the Hell out of my visitors when they land.
When that stops working, I will be in here complaining.
One thing concerns me about your post and that is.....
"(rest is content which is not unique to my site)"
Note the word NOT in bold. If the rest of your page is duplicate content then I think Google will probably discover that eventually and your page will be treated poorly.
If you have a little bit of content from elsewhere on this page then just take the time to rewrite it or put it in the image if you are allowed to use it.
One more note. I am quite confident that Google can figure out when images are reused from other websites. I am not sure that can reduced your rankings at this time, but it might in the future.
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
-
More content, more backlinks, more appealing design, better SEO than competitor but ranking worse. Why?
Me and my team are working hard to put a good SEO strategy in place and good, useful content for our visitors. We're online for a little more than a year and we got some success but nothing compared to the majority of our competitors. The only thing we noticed so far is that our strongest competitors all seem to have a website based on WordPress... well is it possible to rank better than a site based on WP if we optimize everything well? One of our competitor is a very simple, thin affiliate website based on WP and is called www.comparatif-meilleur.fr ... their content is limited but they do better than us in term of ranking organically... On our side (www.lecomparateur.net) we have backlinks from Wikipedia, Dmoz and a couple of other very good sites, plus a better content, better design and better overall optimization. There must be something we do bad, but we can't find it. Please help 😞 P.S. We update our site quite often too
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benoit_20180 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Expired News Content
Ive read some stuff about expired content here, but have yet to find an answer so I thought I would post my question is regarding a news based site and expired content issues. So my site does Recaps, and Previews for sporing events. Well eventually the content does become not relevant as nobody cares about a prediction after the game is done. What would be the best method to deal with this? Should I just leave it there or 301 redirect it to the more relevant games. The reason why I'm asking is because when I have added a more recent game such as New York vs Boston, when I would search for that keyword in google, the page google would show would be like Atlanta vs L.A. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
Wordpress and duplicate content
Hi, I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc. How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks ZCJDa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate content issue for franchising business
Hi All We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details. This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts. The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee. I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this. Kind regards Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterpete0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My client's website is for an organization that is part of a larger organization - which has it's own website. We were given permission to use content from the larger organization's site on my client's redesigned site. The SEs will deem this as duplicate content, right? I can "re-write" the content for the new site, but it will still be closely based on the original content from the larger organization's site, due to the scientific/medical nature of the subject material. Is there a way around this dilemma so I do not get penalized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mills1