Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
-
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag.
Manually changing the descriptions is not an option.
Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"?
Any other ideas?
Thanks!
-
Until your site is the KickAss site in your SERPs just add something catchy to the title tag like "Schedule a Tour!" ....... or....... "Free Beer"........ or..... "See it Today!"
-
Right... after your site is established this might not be a problem. I know that your site is relatively new and that it will become the KickAss site in your SERPs.
Don't do obsessive SEO if you can do efficient SEO.
-
Thank you! You've got some great points!
I like the idea of having both the address and the mls in the title and then reversing them for the mls.
For the photos I have the address as my alt tag. I could certainly add the mls too.
-
Oooh. I like this thought. Right now for most of these searches we are on the front page but not #1. However, this is a brand new site and I haven't built any links to it. So, perhaps, once I've got links and my site is viewed as the "kickass site in the niche" then the duplication will only be a problem for the other realtors?
-
The property address is most important and would definitely use that in the title. You'll find the MLS # to be almost as important. Why not include both in the title? Then reverse the order for H1?
I wouldn't be too concerned about duplicate content. I'm not sure about your area but most areas have an MLS that is syndicating the listings to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites which all use the same description.
In working with real estate sites I also found that "house for sale on {street name}" or "home for sale on {street name}" tended to drive traffic to the the individual property pages.
What are you doing with the property photos? I'd optimize those as well for the property address and MLS number.
-
Go out into the SERPs. See what's happening.
If you have the kickass site in the niche, your page for this home might rank well.
Other guy's problem, not yours.
-
LOL...this is why I was asking the question. Is there anything I can do to help other than manually changing the descriptions?
-
That's even worse.
-
Whoah! You definitely don't want that...
-
Oh...I may have worded my question incorrectly! The content is not duplicated across my site. Rather, the home description is the exact same content as on several other realtors' sites.
-
You can always just have the content indexable on one page and add it to an image for all the other pages.
-
I'd love to discuss this...in fact, I'm going to start a new discussion on it!
-
It's not that, it's just that it's potentially damaging (sorry, I'm quoting that Market Motive seminar again... been doing that a lot lately lol) to have an H1 and title tag that match.
-
Interesting idea. We do get hits because of the content in the description though. for example, we get a lot of hits for "In law suite".
-
Good idea, or have it in an iframe!
-
Is it possible for you to put that listing content in an image? This would allow you to continue using indentical content on all pages. However, the content in the image would not be searchable. If you are just using this content for the user experience, that's fine. If you want it indexed to add quality to the page, you will instead want to make each listing unique.
-
I guess it makes sense to have a different h1. What do you think would be most effective? I think the title should be the house address as this is most likely to be searched. Perhaps the H1 could be "MLS #123456"?
-
I don't know the answer to the actual question but I do know that you should never have the title and h1 match... or have dupe meta descriptions but you already know that
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
-
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Will duplicate content across a .net website and a .ch have negative affects on SERPs?
Hi, I am working with a company that has a .net site and a .ch website that are identical. Will this duplicate content have a negative affect on SERPs? Thanks Ali.B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bmeisterali0 -
Duplicate Content and Titles
Hi Mozzers, I saw a considerable amount of duplicate content and page titles on our clients website. We are just implementing a fix in the CMS to make sure that these are all fixed. What changes do you think I could see in terms of rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Google WMT Showing Duplicate Content, But There is None
In the HTML improvements section of Google Webmaster Tools, it is showing duplicate content and I have verified that the duplicate content they are listing does not exist. I actually have another duplicate content issue I am baffled by, but that it already being discussed on another thread. These are the pages they are saying have duplicate META descriptions, http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/bathroom-remodeling.html (META from bathroom remodeling page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Bathroom Remodeling Washington DC, Bathroom Renovation Washington DC, Bath Remodel, Northern Virginia,DC, VA, Washington, Fairfax, Arlington, Virginia</a>" /> http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/estimate-request.html (META From estimate page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Free estimates basement remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, renovations estimates, Washington DC area</a>" /> WlO9TLh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
How get rid of duplicate content, titles, etc on php cartweaver site?
my website http://www.bartramgallery.com was created using php and cartweaver 2.0 about five years ago by a web developer. I was really happy with the results of the design was inspired to get into web development and have been studying ever since. My biggest problem at this time is that I am not knowledgable with php and the cartweaver product but am learning as I read more. The issue is that seomoz tools are reporting tons of duplicate content and duplicate title pages etc. This is likely from the dynamic urls and same pages with secondary results etc. I just made a new sitemap with auditmypc I think it was called in an attempt to get rid of all the duplicate page titles but is that going to solve anything or do I need to find another way to configure the site? There are many pages with the same content competing for page rank and it is a bit frustrating to say the least. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated even pointing me in the right direction. Thank you, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSOT0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0