Opinions on Boilerplate Content
-
Howdy,
Ideally, uniqueness for every page's title, description, and content is desired. But when a site is very, very large, it becomes impossible. I don't believe our site can avoid boilerplate content for title tags or meta-descriptions. We will, however, markup the pages with proper microdata so Google can use this information as they please.
What I am curious about is boilerplate content repeated throughout the site for the purpose of helping the user, as well as to tell Google what the page is about (rankings).
For instance, this page and this page offer the same type of services, but in different areas. Both pages (and millions of others) offer the exact same paragraph on each page. The information is helpful to the user, but it's definitely duplicate content. All they've changed is the city name.
I'm curious, what's making this obvious duplicate content issue okay? The additional unique content throughout (in the form of different businesses), the small, yet obvious differences in on-site content (title tags clearly represent different locations), or just the fact that the site is HUGELY authorative and gets away with it?
I'm very curious to hear your opinions on this practice, potential ways to avoid it, and whether or not it's a passable practice for large, but new sites.
Thanks!
-
The SEO of the site is probably fine. The problem with the site is that it takes one page of content and smears it across dozens of thin content, duplicate content, cookie cutter pages. The SEO is lipstick on a pig.
-
Thanks again for the response, EGOL. It is appreciated.
Can you point to any examples of large-scale sites like this with better SEO for these pages? I mean, any site that targets every city, neighborhood, park, etc. with content like this should theoretically run into duplicate content and display thin result pages quite often.
And even so, these pages are helpful. I Google "restaurant + small cities near me" and Yelp pages come up, which benefit me.
Yelp is one of the biggest review sites on the web and their filtered search result pages are indexed and ranking ultra high all over the place. What are they doing so special?
This page and this page both offer nearly the same exact results, just shuffled a bit. Beyond simply being too big to get slapped, why is it okay when Yelp does this?
-
I agree. It is on a very thin line. I believe that Google's Panda algo will eventually hit it. I look at lots of site that people say lost traffic. This one has a similar design and content Style.
-
That's interesting. It seems to have been around for quite a while and ranks well. Of all the similar sites I've seen, Houzz seems to walk the thinnest line on bad-SEO though. Their filter creates nearly identical pages, all of which get indexed, and they have no canonicals for any of them and virtually the same on-page SEO as well. Not to mention the same blurbs across millions of pages, etc.
It's weird to me though that a reasonably targeted blurb is such bad business when the rest of the site is so helpful to users. One would think Google would allow it since the blurbs apply to each page and the "results" are the real meat and potatoes of the site.
-
This site has lots of duplicate content from page to page and lots of thin content on a repeating template. It will be hit by Panda.
-
EGOL,
I think you're making unfair assumptions about our site. Each page visible to Google will have helpful information and content on the site. The one's that don't will not be "published" for Google or our users.
I assure you, the site will be worthwhile and helpful to the end user, especially as time progresses. In fact, if you read above, I am asking specifically about adding additional helpful content to the user, but trying to avoid DC issues by posting it throughout each site.
I am not trying to shortcut anything, I'm curious why some sites are able to seemingly circumvent SEO tenets and was hoping for a helpful discussion.
And again, I'll reiterate, I am not interested in boilerplate content to shortcut anything. It would be in addition to existing useful content. The boilerplate content on similar pages would also be beneficial to the end user. Using the examples above, I believe the small blurbs above _can _be helpful to the user. Do you agree?
Thanks for the response.
-
The problem that you face is that you are trying to make a website with millions of pages for which you do not have adequate content. You are trying to take shortcuts by using a cookiecutter instead of doing the work to make a worthy and unique website.
If you continue with your current business plan, I believe that Google will not treat your site very well. These sites used to work in Google over ten years ago and at that time they were ingenious. Today they are spam.
-
The paragraph of helpful content is identical (beyond a city being swapped out) but it still helps their searches. If you tailor a search with one of their cities and a cousin keyword within the text, they pop-up on the front page usually. That's what I'm asking about. Why is Google ignoring this obvious DC?
I'm assuming the business listings are making the page unique enough to override the duplicate paragraph + the site is huge and has TONS of authority.
-
They're not identical, and I notice many directories are set-up like this. Two individual users with different interests would find unique information from both of these samples. The only issue is how your competition has setup their page. For instance, if someone is just targeting Phoenix, and really goes to town with unique information and links, that may rank better because they may be views as more of an authority on the subject.
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
-
Penalty for adding too much content too quickly?
Hi there, We released around 4000 pieces of new content, which all ranked in the first page and did well. We had a database of ~400,000 pieces and so we released the entire library in a couple of days (all remaining 396,000 pages). The pages have indexed. The pages are not ranking, although the initial batch are still ranking as are a handful (literally a handful) of the new 396,000. When I say not ranking - I mean not ranking anywhere (gone up as far as page 20), yet the initial batch we'd be ranking for competitive terms on page 1. Do Google penalise you for releasing such a volume of content in such a short space of time? If so, should we deindex all that content and re-release in slow batches? And finally, if that is the course of action we should take is there any good articles around deindexing content at scale. Thanks so much for any help you are able to provide. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveW19870 -
Publishing content in two or more places?
I've been thinking about publishing an article on LinkedIn and then posting the same article to the news page on the website. It would be high quality informative and useful but is that likely to cause any duplicate content issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Duplicate Content Issues :(
I am wondering how we can solve our duplicate content issues. Here is the thing: There are so many ways you can write a description about a used watch. http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-no-date-stainless-steel-watch-wsilver-dial-5500/ http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch-wblue-dial-5500/ Whats different between these two? The dial color. We have a lot of the same model numbers but with different conditions, dial colors, and bands.. What ideas do you have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingRosales0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate Content Question
We are getting ready to release an integration with another product for our app. We would like to add a landing page specifically for this integration. We would also like it to be very similar to our current home page. However, if we do this and use a lot of the same content, will this hurt our SEO due to duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanGilmore0 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Best practices for handling https content?
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with. Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly. Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently. One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket. Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place. I guess my question is really about best practices when using https. How can I avoid duplication issues? When do I need to use rel=canonical? What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0