Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
-
Hi,
I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties.
While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc.
1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content...
2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text?
3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc?
Thanks!
-
Normally if two pages have similar content, you can use canonical tag to tell Google about your preferred page. But if you want to keep them both without using canonical then Google will randomly decide on of the 2 similar page.
Similar content is an issue for sure. though recently Google's algo has become complex and it can recognize type of the site like it seems to be OK for many eCommerce sites to have similar content.
But if you can reduce the percentage from 50 % to bit lower, it will be better I guess.
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
-
Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, After a bit of advice please, we will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Is this duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content?
Hello, My question is: Is it duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content? For example, here is the original page: http://www.saugstrup.org/en-ny-content-marketing-case-infografik/. But that same content can be found here: http://www.kommunikationsforum.dk/anders-saugstrup/blog/en-ny-content-marketing-case-til-dig, but there is a link back to the original content. Is it still duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JoLindahl912 -
How do I fix issue regarding near duplicate pages on website associated to city OR local pages?
I am working on one e-commerce website where we have added 300+ pages to target different local cities in USA. We have added quite different paragraphs on 100+ pages to remove internal duplicate issue and save our website from Panda penalty. You can visit following page to know more about it. And, We have added unique paragraphs on few pages. But, I have big concerns with other elements which are available on page like Banner Gallery, Front Banner, Tool and few other attributes which are commonly available on each pages exclude 4 to 5 sentence paragraph. I have compiled one XML sitemap with all local pages and submitted to Google webmaster tools since 1st June 2013. But, I can see only 1 indexed page by Google on Google webmaster tools. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/US/Alabama/Vinyl-Banners http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/MO/Kansas-City/Vinyl-Banners and so on... Can anyone suggest me best solution for it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
Old Product Pages
Hi Issue: I have old versions of a product page in the Google index for a product that I still carry. Why: The URLs were changed when we updated this product page a few years ago. There are four different URLs for this product -- no duplicate content issues b/c we updated the product info, Title tags, etc. So I have a few pages indexed by Google for a particular product. Including a current, up-to-date page. The old pages don't get any traffic, but if I type in google search: "product name" site:store.com then all of the versions of this page appear. The old pages don't have any links to them, only one has any PA, and as I said they don't get any traffic, and the current page is around #8 in google for its keyword. Question: Do these old pages need 301 redirects, should I ask google to remove the old URLs? It seems like Google picks the right version of this page for this keyword query, is it possible that the existence of these other pages (that are not nearly as optimized for the keyword) drag it down a bit in the results? Thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
What could be the cause of this duplicate content error?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this? IUJvfZE.png
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson1 -
How can something be duplicate content of itself?
Just got the new crawl report, and I have a recurring issue that comes back around every month or so, which is that a bunch of pages are reported as duplicate content for themselves. Literally the same URL: http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is reporting that http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is both a duplicate title, and duplicate content. Well, I would hope so! It's the same URL! Is this a crawl error? Is it a site error? Has anyone seen this before? Do I need to give more information? P.S. awesomewidgetworld is not the actual site name.
Technical SEO | | BetAmerica0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0