Do dropdowns count as unique content?
-
My current site has some extensive unique database content by "widget" type. Currently we display this info into HTML 's, but we are considering utilizing this data in a dropdown field on each respective widget page.
I want to ensure we don't have thin content...Does the content within the <option>tags on a dropdown count towards unique content?</option>
-
As long as the search engines can crawl it, I doubt that one format would cause your content to be considered "more unique" than the other - it either is unique or it isn't, and the content itself is the same either way. Since it seems like the drop-down is a more user-friendly solution, that's what I'd do.
If you're concerned that your content won't be robust enough to rank for a term, I'd consider adding some additional, relevant text that contains the keywords you're targeting rather than trying to tweak the format of the same text - maybe via a blog post? But if you are finding your content to be unique enough now, in the tables, without adding extra text then I don't think switching it to be in a drop-down is going to wreck that.
-
This is good advice for checking to see if it counts at all, but I guess there is no way to definitively know whether date in a table trumps a dropdown without A/B testing.
-
From everything you're saying, it looks like search engines will be able to crawl the content either way (as long as you make sure the dropdowns are using search-engine-friendly code like HTML or CSS and not JavaScript or Ajax # tags).
Once the site launches, you can double-check that the content's being indexed by doing a site: query in Google that contains a large chunk of the text contained in the dropdown.
-
Not yet. We are still designing wireframes.
I am wondering if the data in a combobox like below would count as unique data:
http://miamicoder.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/image_12.png (possible new display)
We currently have our data displayed in HTML <tables>that I don't believe to be as user friendly, but do count as unique content.</tables>
http://www.learn-html-tutorial.com/Images/FormattedTable.gif
(assuming the data is the same in both pics above)
-
I'm having a hard time picturing what you're describing - do you have an example URL I could take a look at?
-
I was thinking the same...Therefore I am considering populating both my dropdown and a data like my current site to ensure unique content is not too thin and I get long tail searches on some of the more unique product listings.
-
If you can view the code when using a "view source" or similar then the code can be crawled. That being said I don't think an option button would be considered content by a search engine so it wouldn't be unique.
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
-
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
How Many Words To Make Content 'unique?'
Hi All, I'm currently working on creating a variety of new pages for my website. These pages are based upon different keyword searches for cars, for example used BMW in London, Used BMW in Edinburgh and many many more similar kinds of variations. I'm writing some content for each page so that they're completely unique to each other (the cars displayed on each page will also be different so this would not be duplicated either). My question is really, how much content do you think that I'll need on each page? or what is optimal? What would be the minimum you might need? Thank for your help!
Technical SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Content Organization Advice with Big Commerce
Hi folks, We have three places with unique content for our company. Our ecommerce site (hosted on big commerce), our help desk knowledge base (subdomain, hosted on zendesk), and our blog (separate domain, self hosted wordpress). We're about to refocus our efforts on generating high quality content, and I'm trying to figure out the best strategy to organize it. I think from an SEO perspective, if we had all of the content hosted directly on our ecommerce site, that would be best. Unfortunately Big Commerce doesn't have much by way of content management. We can't (yet) install a blogging platform or CMS onto our root domain. What's the next best option? Does it do any good to move our blog to a subdomain? Should I try to post all content on our root domain and just deal with the lack of content management (i.e. just make a new web page for each blog entry). Basically, what's the best strategy in this situation for SEO? Any advice appreciated. Thanks so much! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
How do I combat content theft?
A new site popped up that has completely replicated a site own by my client. This site is literally a copycat, scraped all the content, and copied the design down to the colors. I've already reported the site to the hosting provider and filled a spam report on Google. I noticed that the author changed some of the text, and internal links so that they don't link to our site anymore. Some of these were missed. I'm also going to take a couple preventative actions like change stuff in .htaccess, but that doesn't help me now, just in case it happens again in the future. I'm wondering what else i can or should be doing?
Technical SEO | | flowsimple0