Dealing with duplicate content
-
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites.
What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms.
Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away.
Any thoughts?
-
Thanks Gerd, Marisa & Nakul. All good feedback. I asked this yesterday with another layer pertaining to mobile and I think it complicated the question too much for anyone to understand or answer.
product.com/shop is the ideal solution and that will require the investment in a new "product.com". Forgoing the SERP for buyproduct.com is likely the best option anyways considering it will be gone once investment is made.
Appreciate your responses.
-
I agree with Gerd and Marisa. I would recommend you to consider doing a Cross Domain canonical tag on your buyproduct.com product pages and any other duplicate content to your product.com pages or vice versa, depending upon whichever one you want to keep in the search engines.
Since both your websites have strength and our gaining the SERPS (which does not guarantee that they can't fall tomorrow for getting penalized for duplicate content), I would suggest you take the opportunity to put a plan and strategy together and get this taken care of sooner then later.
-
It seems as though combining the sites is your best option. If that is your long term goal, then spending countless time writing new content for one of them seems like a waste, especially if their rankings aren't suffering. However, that could change overnight, so I'd suggest to try to find a way to put combining them higher on your priority list. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but that is what I'd do if I were in your situation. I know you say it's not in your budget, but what's your budget going to look like if your site gets hit by the next Panda?
-
Are you able to change the domain of buyproduct.com to shop.product.com and then have the shop's product pages and content which is duplicate have the same canonical? Not ideal as your shop would not feature any content.
If you are able to rework buyproduct.com then I would change the product page structure, enrich with hproduct data and other relevant markup (reviews).
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
-
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://mza.seotoolninja.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://mza.seotoolninja.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Image centric site and duplicate content issues
We have a site that has very little text, the main purpose of the site is to allow users to find inspiration through images. 1000s of images come to us each week to be processed by our editorial team, so as part of our process we select a subset of the best images and process those with titles, alt text, tags, etc. We still host the other images and users can find them through galleries that link to the process and unprocessed image pages. Due to the lack of information on the unprocessed images, we are having lots of duplicate content issues (The layout of all the image pages are the same, and there isn't any unique text to differentiate the pages. The only changing factor is the image itself in each page) Any suggestions on how to resolve this issue, will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | wedlinkmedia0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
URL query considered duplicate content?
I have a Magento site. In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate. Note the article was written in 2007.
Technical SEO | | BlazeSunglass0 -
How do I fix this type of duplicate page content problem?
Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content URLs Internal Links External Links Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 26 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 20 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ | 1,630 | 613 | 43 | 110 | As you can see there are three duplicate pages; http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ What would be the best and most efficient way to fix this problem and also how to prevent this from happening? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | brianhughes0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230