Duplicate Content on Website with Multiple Locations
-
Hi there,
I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do.
We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1), and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help.
We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings?
Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.
-
HI,
It doesn't redirect the user, no. It tells Google 'which URL' you prefer to be indexed. Now, again I don't believe that this is the best option, as you want BOTH cities to rank. Does it affect the rankings? Yes, because you are saying Page A is more valuable than the duplicated Page B- leaving Page B out in the wild as the less important page for ranking.
So, again having two versions of the domains ( based on the cities) isn't beneficial, these should both be under one domain ( wp installation) and adding a "locations" page, to reduce the self competition.
-
Thank you for your help Tammy. I read through your links when you first replied and they helped a lot.
Pardon my lack of knowledge here, but I just want to make sure I understand correctly: If I go the rel=canonical route for the "duplicate" pages, it won't actually redirect the user, but will just tell google where the "original" page lives, and that it's duplicated on purpose correct? Does that then hurt the rankings for the site that's not showing as the "original" content?
Thanks again for your help.
-
While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.
Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.
Here are a few articles about that:
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains
Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.
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
-
Unsolved How Should I Increase DA of my Website?
Google itself has been troubled by ranking factors. On top of that, the https://mza.seotoolninja.com/ has worn a new garland of domain authority. It is even more regrettable when a website DA suddenly decreased. As recently on 22nd September, my website's DA was 16. As usual, on September 23, I posted a new informational blog related to QuickBooks antivirus exclusions on my website. The very next day my website DA was decreased. Can anyone who knows SEO help me understand why this always happens specially to me every time? I read the whole forum and all I found out is how my site's DA is decreased.
Moz Bar | | ravigaurav
Can anyone let us know whether we can increase the Domain Authority of our website only by creating backlinks or there can be some other activities also?0 -
Duplicate Content & Title Tag Group Fields on MoZ Report
Hello, On my SEO MOZ exported Site Crawl CSV report, I have columns for Duplicate Content Group & for Duplicate Title Tag Group. The values in the columns are numerical - 20, 5 , 15, etc. Can anyone explain to me what these values represent and how I can fix the issues I presume they represent? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | AED-1
Scott0 -
Why do my Moz duplicate content results show me pages with no noticeably similar content?
Sometimes the "Pages with Duplicate Content" results under Content Issues show pages that, from what I'm able to see or otherwise test, have no duplicate content, save for the same navigation that exists on all of my pages. For example, a recent issue said that the following pages had duplicate content:
Moz Bar | | rickmic
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/html/slider-overlay
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/ufaqs/what-do-i-get-with-my-purchase-of-freezerworks
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/videos/fda-and-freezerworks-2
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/lims-testing-module Even a side-by-side of the page source in a text comparison tool shows nothing but navigation and scripts used in every page. Am I not seeing something?2 -
Related topics / content suggestion
Hello, In the related topic feature now called content suggestions https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/related-topics-in-moz-pro. Are the words indicated words to include in my content or are they "topics" to talk about using words that would describe those words turning these words into concepts ? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | seoanalytics0 -
I keep getting a 429 Too Many Request error for a wp-login page on my website. Is there a way to prevent that from happening, or fix outside of redirecting on the back end of WordPress?
I have a client that keeps coming up with 429 Too Many Request critical crawl errors. I re-directed some of them on the back end of WordPress, but additional keep coming in. The URL has a WP-Login and directs to back end login section. Is there a reason that would come up as an error, how can I prevent it from happening again, and how can I fix the remaining current errors outside of redirecting back to /? Thanks, Kalyn Lengieza
Moz Bar | | GrindstoneConsult0 -
Duplicate page found with MOZ crawl test?
When I crawl my website www.radiantguard.com, the crawl test comes back with what appears to be a duplicate of my home page: http://www.radiantguard.com and http://www.radiantguard.com/ Does the crawler indeed see two different pages and therefore, are my search engine rankings potentially affected, AND is this because of how my rel canonical is set up?
Moz Bar | | rhondafranklin0 -
Site Crawl report show strange duplicate pages
Beginning in early in Feb, we got a big bump in duplicate pages. The URLs of the pages are very odd: Example URL:
Moz Bar | | Neo4j
http://[email protected]/dir/page.php
is duplicate with http://website.com/dir/page.php I checked though the site, nginx conf files, and referral pages, and could not find what is prefixing the pages with 'http://firstname.lastname@'. Any ideas? The person whose name is 'Firstname Lastname' is stumped as well. Thanks.0 -
Can I delete a SEO campaign in Moz, and start a new one for a different website?
Would be nice to know, as I'm limited to 5 campaigns, and the most important work is done for 2 site's, so I would like to switch that to 2 other website's. Regards,
Moz Bar | | mrblue910