Is this Duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
This is now popping up in Moz after using this for over 6 months.
It is saying this is now duplicate site content.What do we think? Is this a bad strategy, it works well on the SERPS but could be damaging the root domain page ranking? I guess this is a little shady.
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-crowborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-desborough/
http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/area/close-up-magician-in-didcot/
Thanks.
-
If what you've got right now is working for you and bringing in relevant (converting) traffic then I would be cautious about doing anything too drastic. There's always a risk associated with any changes you make like this and the last thing you want to do is kill your own traffic.
I wouldn't immediately tear down the duplicate pages, but I would start to think about how I could update some of the content and maybe create new pages that better engage with your visitors and help to increase your conversion rate (I don't know what your conversion rate is.). That may help off set any impact cause by a potential loss of rankings for those duplicate pages might.If the pages continue to rank then it'll still help!
I've got some thoughts that might be useful (please take this as constructive criticism and recognise that I don't know your niche as well as you do!)
For example, the copy on your home page is "all about you" and very little about what your visitor. What do I get if I book you for an event? What's your value proposition, the benefits of your particular service and how can you differentiate yourself from the competition.
A great place to start is to speak to your last 10 customers and find out why they hired you, what were the things that convinced them to hire you, what were the concerns/doubts they the had?
I'm guessing here (you'll need to talk to your real customers) but if I was hiring you for my wedding, I wouldn't be so worried about the price, or the quality of your routines (I don't know what ground-breaking magic is!) but more concerned with questions like:
- "What if it's all going to be a bit cheesy?"
- Is this going to annoy my guests?
- Is it going to be intrusive?
- Can he work with the venue?
- Can the performance be tailored to the theme of my event or the location?
If you can figure our what really matters to people you can quickly put them at ease and even turn these concerns into benefits.
You might want to also look at how you're using images. It can be hard on the ego, but it's not you that's the important thing here - if you can show more of the reactions and atmosphere that you create then that may help people fell that "yes, I want some of that for my wedding/party etc"
Don't bury your testimonials away on a testimonials page. You've got some great comments there about "delighting guests", "making birthdays special"... I'd use those on your relevant pages. (Personally I think they're more compelling than the "celeb" testimonials.)
Segment your customers and work that group's particular needs/concerns. I'm sure you know the kind of specific issues that come up when your dealing with corporate customers.
I really do think it would help to write the content in the first person, using as natural language as possible. As it stand, the site comes across a bit cold, and doesn't let your personality come across.
Hope this helps.
-
Doug,
Thank you for your response, it solidifys what I have been thinking for the last few months about removing the keyword optimisation on site.
Yes, I do get a lot of work from those pages, and they do seem to convert fairly well. I guess I need to change the title of the website and the copy for human eyes, not google's.
The only fear there is that I drop out of rankings. I guess that is the price to pay if you want to play by the rules!
With regards to the duplicate pages, what should I do then, everyone in my niche is doing it, shall I get rid of them all and bite the bullet!?
-
Nice!
Tom, out of interest, do these pages get much search traffic? What is the conversion rate like on these - do they actually get your any work. If you're not getting any traffic/conversions then just showing up in the SERPS for your keyword is just vanity thing.
If the tactic is getting you work then you obviously don't want to tear it all down, although I'm sure you understand that it's not exactly the kind of thing Google's terms of service are trying to encourage. These kind of tactics are still working, but there's a risk attached too and it's not something I would recommend and not something I'd feel comfortable recommending.
You've got to look at your competition too - and I see that it's a pretty common (almost ubiquitous) tactic used in your niche.
Do you detail the area your cover on your home page? I'm worried that seeing "Magician London" at the start of your page title and the keywords "Magician London" all over the copy could put people off looking for something local.
How can people find out if you cover their area when they visit your site?
The page copy doesn't read very naturally! Have you tried reading it out-loud? I'm, not sure you'd talk to someone like this face to face. I would try to make the text more natural and use the first person. After all, you're trying to sell yourself aren't you, and it's your personality, that's makes you different from your competition.
My general advice would to think less about optimising for search engines, and start thinking about optimising your your visitors, what information are they looking for and what are they trying to achieve on your site...
-
Hi there, this is definitely not a good idea from an SEO stand point. I strongly recommend to you to have the content written uniquely for each of those pages. I have seen methods like these making websites vanish from the index as well as making websites safely pass under the Google's radar. But, we should stick to the best practices and see to it that all the pages on our websites have substantially unique content so as to find and secure their place into the SERPs. Quality content that is unique, fresh, highly relevant, interesting, link and share worthy can literally spell magic for your SEO efforts. Just my two cents my friend.
Best of luck to you,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche1 -
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Duplicate keywords in URL?
Is there such a thing as keyword stuffing URLs? Such as a domain name of turtlesforsale.com having a directory called turtles-for-sale that houses all the pages on the site. Every page would start out with turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/. Good or bad idea? The owner is hoping to capitalize on the keywords of turtles for sale being in the URL twice and ranking better for that reason.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Image Optimization & Duplicate Content Issues
Hello Everyone, I have a new site that we're building which will incorporate some product thumbnail images cut and pasted from other sites and I would like some advice on how to properly manage those images on our site. Here's one sample scenario from the new website: We're building furniture and the client has the option of selecting 50 plastic laminate finish options from the Formica company. We'll cut and paste those 50 thumbnails of the various plastic laminate finishes and incorporate them into our site. Rather than sending our website visitors over to the Formica site, we want them to stay put on our site, and select the finishes from our pages. The borrowed thumbnail images will not represent the majority of the site's content and we have plenty of our own images and original content. As it does not make sense for us to order 50 samples from Formica & photograph them ourselves, what is the best way to handle to issue? Thanks in advance, Scott
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ccbamatx0 -
Competitor owns two domains which are essentially duplicates. Is this allowed?
Hello everyone,One of my competitors has two E-commerce sites that are almost exactly the same. The company re-branded a few years ago (changed the company name, changed the domain name) but kept the first domain live which is still fairly successful. Their re-branded website is a Top 1000 retailer.The thing is, both websites are essentially the EXACT SAME. They have the same products (with the same item #'s), the same pricing, the same copy and product descriptions, the same contact info, same layout, etc. The internal search bar on the first domain even redirects to their current site! The only real difference are the brand names. Currently, both sites are ranking very well for some very competitive keywords. For the past two years, I kept waiting for Google to penalize one (or both) of them for duplication. But for some reason Google seems to have not noticed. **Is there any way to "show google" site duplication they might be missing?**Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bpharris90141 -
Duplicate content showing on local pages
I have several pages which are showing duplicate content on my site for web design. As its a very competitive market I had create some local pages so I rank high if someone is searching locally i.e web design birmingham, web design tamworth etc.. http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design.html http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design-tamworth.html http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design-lichfield.html I am trying to work out what is the best way reduce the duplicate content. What would be the best way to remove the duplicate content? 1. 301 redirect (will I lose the existing page) to my main web design page with the geographic areas mentioned. 2. Re write the wording on each page and make it unique? Any assistance is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0 -
IP-Based Content on Homepage?
We're looking to redesign one of our niche business directory websites and we'd like to place local content on the homepage catered to the user based on IP. For instance, someone from Los Angeles would see local business recommendations in their area. Pretty much a majority of the page would be this kind of content. Is this considered cloaking or in any way a bad idea for SEO? Here are some examples of what we're thinking: http://www.yellowbook.com http://www.yellowpages.com/ I've seen some sites redirect to a local version of the page, but I'm a little worried Google will index us with localized content and the homepage would not rank for any worthwhile keywords. What's the best way to handle this? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | newriver0