Duplicate pages or note? Variations just due to language changes?
-
I have some pages marked as duplicates, so I want to do what I can to solve the issues concerned.
One issue concerns duplicates where the page content is indeed the same except for the language that the content is offered in.
The URL for example of the documentation page of the site, in English is as follows:
http://www.domain.com/support/documentationWe then have the same content in German, French, Russian using the following URLs.
http://www.domain.com/de/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/fr/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/ru/support/documentationEach page has links to PDFs which are all in fact in English so the links to the docs are the same. Moz is flagging up all these pages as being duplicate content (which it is when translated back into English, but is not if you just consider that they are using completely different languages!)
Has anyone any thoughts on how to solve this? Or is this something not to worry about / disregard?
Many thanks
Simon
-
Ryan - thank you too for taking the time to respond.
Had a quick peek at the blog you noted - going to go back and read it v-e-r-y slowly!
Ditto, many thanks re the webconfs link - plenty of fun tools to try out there. Am sure it will all deepen my learning / confusion!Thanks again!
-
Don - thank you so much for responding
I think you may well have identified the issue too! The documentation page is the same in each case - has a table with e.g. 4 columns and 20 or so rows - and I guess much of the structural content of the pages, irrespective of the linguistic variations of the text shown on screen, is the same.
Will look closer at this.
Assuming this is the case - the next logical questions would be: Does it matter in terms of SEO? Or is it a kind of 'false positive' which can be noted but ignored? What could I do about it anyway? I guess the answer is implied in your answer above: change the template for each language?
Allied to this, is the fact that since the site is 'growing' with multiple language versions, the problem seen with this sample page will potentially be replicated all over the site. Again, the big question is about the effect on SEO. Web pages are scoring well for brand terms and other important words, and while there are new phrases and words to focus on, I am unsure whether correcting these is to prevent strict penalties or simply to make already-decent rankings as good as they can be.
Thanks in advance for any further points you care to make.
-
Hi Simon. Don has given you some good guidance. Here's a recent Moz Dev Blog post on the subject: https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/. Note their images explaining much of what Don described. Two pages having enough shared phrases (because of the header, footer, nav, etc) can trigger the duplicate warning. While the latter part of the dev blog post certainly gets technical, it should explain why you might be getting duplicate content warnings even further if that's your bent.
Since each tool is a bit different you can also check your pages with other tools, such as: http://www.webconfs.com. Cheers!
-
Hi Simon,
Okay so crawlers can crawl PDF's unless they are encrypted / encoded. However since they link to the PDF that shouldn't be the issue.Ref: googleblog
How much content are on these pages? I ask because when there is thin content you may find that the template itself is causing the duplication problem, unless of course you are using different templates for each language as well.
Take for example a page that reads.
en: The woman eats frozen fruit daily.
de: Die Frau isst gefrorenes Gemüse jegen tag.
es: La mujer come las verduras congeladas diariaNow surround each of those pages with a header content, footer content, right / left column content same images same alt tags and the deviation of content is so small it is not noticed.
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
-
Google keeps marking different pages as duplicates
My website has many pages like this: mywebsite/company1/valuation mywebsite/company2/valuation mywebsite/company3/valuation mywebsite/company4/valuation ... These pages describe the valuation of each company. These pages were never identical but initially, I included a few generic paragraphs like what is valuation, what is a valuation model, etc... in all the pages so some parts of these pages' content were identical. Google marked many of these pages as duplicated (in Google Search Console) so I modified the content of these pages: I removed those generic paragraphs and added other information that is unique to each company. As a result, these pages are extremely different from each other now and have little similarities. Although it has been more than 1 month since I made the modification, Google still marks the majority of these pages as duplicates, even though Google has already crawled their new modified version. I wonder whether there is anything else I can do in this situation? Thanks
Technical SEO | | TuanDo96270 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
.co.uk/index.html or just .co.uk - my on-page reports are different for both - why?
It looks like the same thing, yet it has a different on-page report for each version - why is this. Please share your ideas with me on this. The original url is http://bath.waspkilluk.co.uk/index.html. Many Thanks - Simon.
Technical SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?
I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive. Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct? Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?
Technical SEO | | ICM0 -
301 lots of old pages to home page
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao1