Duplicate content question
-
Hi there,
I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve.
When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate.
What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this?
Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page?
Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
-
Sounds like your index page is most helpful for users to see all your videos than for Google and other search engines. I'd either figure out a way for your index page to be less duplicate content or just de-index. I'd imagine that most searches which land a user to your site are going to be for specific videos, not general videos made by your brand. The latter group of folks will likely land on your homepage.
-
Hi,
There is no real issue with either noindex or rel=canonical. Which one I would choose would depend if you have been penalised for this already?
Canonical is used to tell search engines of a preferred page, and is used to handle duplication issues, but I wouldn't create a constantly changing canonical in this manner. I would set the http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html to canonical back to http://www.theatermania.com/videos/, as this is the main page for all videos.
-Andy
-
Many times, WordPress users (and similar CMS') noindex their media categories to prevent duplicate content. I suggest noindexing the media category if you have a main page for the videos.
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
-
Could duplicate (copied) content actually hurt a domain?
Hi 🙂 I run a small wordpress multisite network where the main site which is an informative portal about the Langhe region in Italy, and the subsites are websites of small local companies in the tourism and wine/food niche. As an additional service for those who build a website with us, I was thinking about giving them the possibility to use some ouf our portal's content (such as sights, events etc) on their website, in an automatic way. Not as an "SEO" plus, but more as a service for their current users/visitors base: so if you have a B&B you can have on your site an "events" section with curated content, or a section about thing to see (monuments, parks, museums, etc) in that area, so that your visitors can enjoy reading some content about the territory. I was wondering if, apart from NOT being benefical, it would be BAD from an SEO point of view... ie: if they could be actually penlized by google. Thanks 🙂 Best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Enrico_Cassinelli0 -
Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.
Hi guys, We're planning on starting a Saas based service where we'll be selling different skins. Let's say WordPress themes, though it's not about that. Say we have an url called site.com/ and we would like to direct all seo juice to the mother landing page /best-wp-themes/ but then have that juice flow towards our additional pages: /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozify
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes
/best-wp-themes/?id=Fiximoz /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozicom Challenges: 1. our content would be formatted like this:
a. Same content - features b. Same content - price c. Different content - each theme will have its own set of features / design specs. d. Same content - testimonials. How would be go about not being penalised by SE's for the duplicate content, but still have the /?id=whatever pages be indexed with proper content? 2. How do we go about making sure SEO juice flows to the /?id pages too?Basically it's the same thing with different skins. Thanks for the help!0 -
Duplicating relevant category content in subcategories. Good or bad for google ranking?
In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages. For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Duplicate content, website authority and affiliates
We've got a dilemma at the moment with the content we supply to an affiliate. We currently supply the affiliate with our product database which includes everything about a product including the price, title, description and images. The affiliate then lists the products on their website and provides a Commission Junction link back to our ecommerce store which tracks any purchases with the affiliate getting a commission based on any sales via a cookie. This has been very successful for us in terms of sales but we've noticed a significant dip over the past year in ranking whilst the affiliate has achieved a peak...all eyes are pointing towards the Panda update. Whenever I type one of our 'uniquely written' product descriptions into Google, the affiliate website appears higher than ours suggesting Google has ranked them the authority. My question is, without writing unique content for the affiliate and changing the commission junction link. What would be the best option to be recognised as the authority of the content which we wrote in the first place? It always appears on our website first but Google seems to position the affiliate higher than us in the SERPS after a few weeks. The commission junction link is written like this: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1428744-10475505?sid=shopp&url=http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/vango-calisto-600xl-tent.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi. I am getting error of having duplicate content on my website and pages its showing there are: www.mysitename.com www.mysitename.com/index.html As my best knowledge it only one page, I know this can be solved with some conical tag used in header, but do not know how. Can anyone please tell me about that code or any other way to get this solved. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetraffic0