Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
-
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
-
Hi Camilo,
thanks for the clarification. As this content wil not be available anymore on the "old" pages it will only exist on the newly created blog pages there will be no duplicate content issues. These newly created blog pages with the content removed from "old" pages will start from scratch for ranking. and the "old" pages could loose some ranking because you reduced the onpage ranking.
This is not per se bad as it is part of your strategy to improve on conversions (which should be the most important kpi anyway).
You could help these new blog pages a bit by linking to them from the "old" page.
-
Hello Ramon and James,
Sorry for the confusion.
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> current site (accessible directly homepage though main navigation)
will also be available on the new site, with the same URL.
The reason why i post this question is, on the new site, i will be reducing the content on this page (and others) by 80%. That 80% worth of content from the current pages in question, will not exists in the new site. It will not be on the new site because all the content on some pages have been considered to be too exhausting for clients to read and convert to a lead. We have created the new website, same urls, with leaner content to drive more conversions. Less overwhelming to site visitors.
For example, on this page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/
there are two segments under subheadings: What is an air conditioning system? and another called: How an air conditioner works.
Both of these segments will not be in the new website.Well, i want to republish the lost content as new blogs. My question was, since the soon to be lost content is currently indexed in google, if i republish them as a new set of blogs after the new site goes live, so will Google see the new blogs as duplicate content since it already has been indexed by them?
-
Hi Camilo,
now i am really confused, if you want to maintain the 80% pages and you said they will remain the same url when you make them accessible in your blog.
so
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> current site (accessible directly homepage though main navigation)
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> new site (accessible through blog)
than why would you need canonical at all and why would you loose rank (besides some lost due to the fact the page is not linked directly from the homepage but from the blog)?
Maybe i am missing something
-
Hi Camilo,
Interesting as google states "Only include critic reviews that have been directly produced by your site..." on https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews#local-business-reviews.
I can only imagine they didn´t realize these reviews were not produced directly by your site because of the way you implemented them in the footer.
-
Thank you Roman for your response.
I forgot to realize that Google will recalculate the rank on the new page. My concern is that the new page rank (although keeping the same URL) will loose some ranking.
If i create a new blog post with the content that is not used in the new page (same page url), and i use a cannonical tag on the new blog post linking to the redesigned page, will the new blog post be indexed and possibly out rank the page i am transferring content from?
-
Hello Ramon,
Interesting that you mention the schema markup. It will be on the new site as well. Just yesterday I guided the redesign company to include such markup. Last week, i did receive a google message though my webmaster tools (console) stating that i had potentially spammy code. So what i did, was i added the reviews (from Yelp, Google, Facebook, BBB) to the footer of my website. They were not on the site prior to last week. Once i added them, i filed a reconsideration request explaining what i did and why i did it, google responded saying they approve and they removed the manual action. So once again, our website displays star ratings on the SERPs. see attached image. They were showing prior to last week manual action. then they were removed on i received the manual action. after i added the reviews to the site's footer, and filed a reconsideration request, the manual action was removed and the ratings re-appeared in the SERPs.
The new site will keep all its urls. They will not change. Just the content on a few core pages. So i am gathering that it is ok to make the content that will be deleted into a blog.
-
Hello James,
I appreciate your two cents, greatly. I too am not a huge fan of the new site, but I am giving it a shot. Our current site is content heavy and ranks well for our terms. The change in design is geared to converting more leads (calls and forms). So I am giving this change a shot which is aimed to a less technical audience. People looking to fix their ac. I just hope that the new site still keeps its rankings. All urls will remain the same.
-
If some page is useful for your users or audience you dont delete that page.
In your case is not your desicion, so you have 2 alternatives,1-Redirect those pages to another page with similar content (it has to be a better content than the orginal)
2-The other option is add a canonical tag, basically you will trasfer the authority of the old page to the new one.But there is one factor that you need to keep in mind, that factor is the URL. If your new page will use the URL of the old page, there is no reason
to keep live the old pages because from the google perspective you would be replaced the old pages.Example
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old content
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> New Page with New contentFrom the Google perspective your new page is replacing the old one, so Google need to recalculate the rank of the page (links, content, ux ect).
So no matter, if your republish the content in your blog and then you add some cannonical tags
Example
https://servicechampions.com/blog/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old contentTo Google the constant parameter is the URL if change it change the ecuation. My advices, Dont change the URL structure, keep the same URL structure and add some improvements.
Example
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old content
https://servicechampions.com/service-air-conditioning/ ----> New Page with New contentAnd then to avoid duplicate content issues add the canonical tag the older page so in that way
you will trasfer the authority from the old to the new pageRead this article will help you a lot
A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Your Website Without Destroying Your SEO
-
Hi,
As a general rule its fundemental to maintain pages that are relevant for your audience and generate organic traffic so i would say yes its a good idea to republish as a blog. Furthermore because i see that a big part of these pages (though i don´t know exactly which 80% you will loose) are pages that are a perfect fit for a blog, like how to and informational articles.
Would be good to maintain the same url´s to avoid redirects but depending on the cms being used that might proof more difficult. At least maintain meta data and redirects with 301´s.
I also saw you were using third party reviews in schema markup on your current site (but not,yet, on your new site) and this is not a good idea as this is against google´s guidelines (more on this here http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-local-reviews-schema-guidelines-257745)
Success with your new site
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
-
Please provide solution for my website? Duplicate content Problem
I have 2 Domains with the same name with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, So I have my great content (that contains a link to our site) that I want to distribute to high quality relevant sites in my niche as part of a link building campaign. Can I distribute this to lots of sites? The reason I ask is that those sites will then have duplicate content to all the other sites I distribute the content to won;t they? I this duplication bad for them and\or us? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Dynamic 301's causing duplicate content
Hi, wonder if anyone can help? We have just changed our site which was hosted on IIS and the page url's were like this ( example.co.uk/Default.aspx?pagename=About-Us ). The new page url is example.co.uk/About-Us/ and is using Apache. The 301's our developer told us to use was in this format: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/Default.aspx$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoGroup51
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^pagename=About-Us$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/About-Us/ [R=301,L] This seemed to work from a 301 point of view; however it also seemed to allow both of the below URL's to give the same page! example.co.uk/About-Us/?pagename=About-Us example.co.uk/About-Us/ Webmaster Tools has now picked up on this and is seeing it a duplicate content. Can anyone help why it would be doing this please. I'm not totally clued up and our host/ developer cant understand it too. Many Thanks0 -
Duplicate Content Help
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean. What would be best practice to fix this issue? Kind Regards Eddie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate content ramifications for country TLDs
We have a .com site here in the US that is ranking well for targeted phrases. The client is expanding its sales force into India and South Africa. They want to duplicate the site entirely, twice. Once for each country. I'm not well-versed in international SEO. Will this cause a duplicate content filter? Would google.co.in and google.co.za look at google.com's index for duplication? Thanks. Long time lurker, first time question poster.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alter_Imaging0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0