Sub-category considered duplicate content?
-
Hello,
My craw diagnostics from the PRO account is telling me that the following two links have duplicate content and duplicate title tag:
-
http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases (New Blu-ray Releases)
-
http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases/action-adventure (New Action & Adventure Releases | Blu-ray)
I am really new to the SEO world so I am stuck trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. My question is how should I fix this issue.
I guess I can put canonical tag on all sub-categories but I was worried that search engines would not craw the sub-categories and index potentially valuable pages.
Thanks for all the help.
-
-
Thank you very much for your thorough thoughts, explanation, and your answer to my problem.
Just want to put my thoughts into words here so maybe this conversation can help others that are in the same shoes. The answer to the one question that you've raised, “do users benefit from your site?”, is an idea that I'm trying to prove. You are correct, the site does not provide real unique content except trying to improve user experience to help explore recent product releases on Amazon.com.
This is a niche product because most people are interested in the popular releases and not interested in browsing hundreds of releases (popular or not) by their release date but I believe there are enthusiasts that may benefit from this site. I want to benefit the people that are not just looking for the popular releases. But again, this is yet to be proven.
Thanks for sharing some great ideas to help improve my site. I will keep the review and user generated content concept in mind.
-
The challenge you face is your site does not provide any content. It seems you are an affiliate site for Amazon.com.
The question is, do users benefit from your site? When a user enters a search term in Google, are they ever better off for having found your site? Or would users be better off going directly to amazon?
I am not criticizing your site personally, but sharing google's view. If you offered a good, independent review of each movie, that is great. If you encourage users to generate content by asking their opinions, that is another positive way to go. But to simply link to thousands of movies on another site is not offering value to users or the internet.
The first step is answering the question...what does my site offer users? Why would users feel fortunate to have found my site? Once you have that answer, build upon it.
For your category page problem, you have two options. You can add the "noindex, follow" meta tag to the page. This tag tells search engines that you are not providing unique content and the pages should not be indexed.
Another option is to add unique content to the category pages. For your Action and Adventure page you can describe what movies are part of that genre. "Action and Adventure category includes movies ranging from Die Hard to Indiana Jones. Any fast-paced, heart pumping action movie fits well into this category....." Your content should be at least a few hundred words, something you wrote yourself, and something users might find helpful.
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
-
I have a WP site which uses categories to display the same content in several locations. Which items should get a canonical tag to avoid a ding for duplicate content?
So...I have a Knowledge Center and press room that pretty much use the same posts. So...technically the content looks like its on several pages because the post shows up on the Category listing page. Do I add a Canonical tag to each individual post...so that it is the only one that is counted? Also...I have a LONG disclaimer that goes at the bottom of most of the posts. would this count as duplicate content? Is there a way to markup a single paragraph to tell the spiders not to crawl it?
Reporting & Analytics | | LindsayiHart0 -
Been stuck on seo duplication issues shopify
hey there we have been working on some of our webshops and recently started with analytics/moz,but we have basicly hit a brick wall when it comes to www.krawattenwelt.de since we have had 5k high priority issues (duplicate content) and 20k medium priority issues now i have tried a large amount of solutions regarding the duplicate content issues but it didnt work so we basicly reverted it back to for now and i have the feeling i am really running out of options is there anyone who has an idea on how to do this? duplicate content issues are as follows example:http://krawattenwelt.de/collections/budget-9-15 issues with:http://krawattenwelt.de/collections/budget-9-15/modell_normal and with:http://krawattenwelt.de/collections/budget-9-15/modell_normal?page=1
Reporting & Analytics | | WebMaster2050 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Fresh Content Still As important?
We have an internal debate, that perhaps y'all can help us resolve. In the past "freshness" of content has been important, correct? (Google's QDF for example) In the past (to present) when we build a site with the intent to SEO the site, we build the core pages with the expectation that we will be adding more site pages as the project progresses, thus settling the "fresh content" factor. But it has been proposed to us, from a client, that completely building the site out with all the pages you hope to rank, getting the upfront bang for your buck. The expectation is that the traffic soars right-off. Now the client says that he has been doing this for years and has not been affected by any alog changes. (although we have not seen proof of this from him) So our question is this: Is it better to provide a website full of fresh content at the beginning of the project, for a jumpstart on traffic, then leave the site alone ( for the most part) or Is it better to have core pages of fresh content at the start, and build out new pages from their, so the website remains fresh every month? And can you prove your argument? (we need cold hard facts to be convinced 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Is Google able to determine duplicate content every day/ month?
A while ago I talked to somebody who used to work for MSN a couple of years ago within their engineering department. We talked about a recent dip we had with one of our sites.We argued this could be caused by the large amount of duplicate content we have on this particular website (+80% of our site). Then he said, quoted: "Google seems only to be able to determine every couple of months instead of every day if the content is actually duplicate content". I clearly don't doubt that duplicate content is a ranking factor. But I would like to know you guys opinions about Google being only able to determine this every couple of X months instead of everyday. Have you seen or heard something similar?
Reporting & Analytics | | Martijn_Scheijbeler0 -
Duplicate content warnings
I have a ton of duplicate content warnings for my site poker-coaching.net, but I can't see where there are duplicate URLs. I cannot find any function where I could check the original URL vs a list of other URLs where the duplicate content is?
Reporting & Analytics | | CatfishTPA0 -
Setting up Analytics on a Site that Uses Frames For Some Content
I work with a real estate agent and he uses strings from another tool to populate the listings on his site. In an attempt to be able to track traffic to both the framed pages and the non-framed pages he has two sets of analytics code on his site - one inside the frame and one for the regular part of the site. (there's also a third that the company who hosts his site and provides all these other tools put on his site - but I don't think that's really important to this conversation). Not only is it confusing looking at the analytics data, his bounce rate is down right unmanageable. As soon as anyone clicks on any of the listings they've bounced away. Here's a page - all of those listings below " Here are the most recent Toronto Beaches Real Estate Listings" are part of a frame. http://eastendtorontohomes.com/toronto-beach-real-estate-search/ I'm not really sure what to do about it or how to deal with it? Anyone out there got any good advice? And just in case you're wondering there aren't any other options - apart from spending thousands to build his own database thingie. We've thought about that (as other agents in the city have done that), but just aren't sure it's worth it. And, quite frankly he doesn't want to spend the money.
Reporting & Analytics | | annasus0 -
Duplicate page content
I have a website which "houses" five different and completely separate departments, so the content is separated by subfolders. e.g. domain.com/department1 domain.com/department2 etc. and each have their own individual top navigation menus. There is an "About Us" section for each department which has about 6 subpages (Work for us, What we do, Awards etc.) but the problem is that the content for each department is exactly the same. The only difference is the navigation menu and the breadcrumbs. This isn't ideal as a change to one page means having to make the change to all 5 and from an SEO perspective it's duplicate content x5 (apart from the Nav). One solution I can see is to have the "About Us" section moved to the root level (domain.com/about-us) and have a generic nav, possibly with the department names on it. The only problem with this is that it disrupts the user journey if they are forced away from the department that they're chosen. Basically i'm looking for suggestions or examples of other sites that have got around this problem, I need inspiration! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | haydennz0