How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
-
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
-
No it's not possible.
Let's say you have http://foo.com/a and http://bar.com/b and both have the exact same content, google will choose one, index it, and forget about the other.
Let's say you have 1000 pages on both foo.com and bar.com exactly the same 1000 pages, google will analyze each page one by one, and choose one version for the index, and forget about the other, depending on a variety of factors (like the domain itself and backlink profile) will pick some pages from foo.com and some from bar.com, but you will still have only 1000 pages in the index.
How much of the content of each page you need to change to differentiate is unknown since no one knows the code of google algo.
You can try with guess and test, you change something and you see what happen monitoring changes in the indexing of the edited pages.
-
Hi Steve,
It is pretty well known duplicate content is not a "good thing" but it doesn't mean it will hurt you directly. Google rarely will penalize a site for duplicate content REF: Matt Cutts
It does however make ranking a specific page harder when you're competing with yourself. Most SEO tools will warn you about each case of duplicate content it finds which can also be annoying.
In the best case scenario you may rank multiple pages for longer tailed keywords for example.. something like
Main Keyword: Gourmet Shopping
Tails: Dayton Ohio, Tampa Florida, Los Angles California, Topeka KansasIn such case you may would rank 1 of those pages over the other for Gourmet Shopping however if there was enough specific location specific content you may find other pages ranking well in those city state type searches.
Hope that makes sense,
Don
-
If you have unique content on the actual franchise page (location etc.), the underlying pages could be duplicate content but use canonicals to point to the original content.
So you need at least one page per franchise to be unique (and use the proper markup if applicable).
Good luck
-
Is it impossible to write unique content for these pages? Even a small amount of unique content on top of the exact same copy would be beneficial.
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
-
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
Dear all, I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content. The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla). When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages. What would you choose? Let me know what you think. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Product Page on Eccomerce Site ranking very poorly - Unique Product description but duplicate content on other tabs.
Hi All, I have a query regarding my Product pages on my eCommerce site. I have unique Product descriptions but some of the other page content on the other tabs i.e Hire Terms , Delivery , About the Hire Company - Are duplicated across ALL my products. Is that okay or how should I deal with them ? See example url of one of my products below below - http://goo.gl/aSFPqP My products currently rank very badly... 200 + so Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Coupon Website Has Tons of Duplicate Content, How do I fix it?
Ok, so I just got done running my campaign on SEOMOZ for a client of mine who owns a Coupon Magazine company. They upload thousands of ads into their website which gives similar looking duplicate content ... like http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/100 and
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keith-Eneix
http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/101. There's about 3200 duplicates right now on the website like this. The client wants the coupon pages to be indexed and followed by search engines so how would I fix the duplicate content but still maintain search-ability of these coupon landing pages?0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0