Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?
-
Hi all,
I have 1000s of products where the product description is very technical and extremely hard to rewrite or create an unique one.
I'll probably will have to use the contend provided by the brands, which can already be found in dozens of other sites.
My options are:
-
Use the Google on/off tags "don't index
" -
Put the content in an image
Are there any other options?
We'd always write our own unique copy to go with the technical bit.
Cheers
-
-
This applies to Google Mini or Search Appliance which are custom search tools for an individual website.
They allow site owners to sculpt the indexing of their private set ups.
Adwords also has something to help indicate the important content for determining the page topic for relating ads.
However, they don't apply to Googlebot spidering as mentioned above.
-
Hi - The google on/off tags idea I got it from https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/46/admin_crawl/Preparing
| index | Words between the tags are not indexed as occurring on the current page. | fish shark
mackerel | The words fish and mackerel are indexed for this page, but the occurrence of shark is not indexed.
This page could appear in search results for the term shark only if the word appears elsewhere on the page or in anchortext for links to the page.
Hyperlinks that appear within these tags are followed. | -
I agree with Takeshi, but would also like to add that so-called "Google on/off tags" are a myth. What you have typed out would be an HTML comment (they begin with
-
If the descriptions are very technical then likely there is a fair amount of repetition in the sentence pattern, diction etc. I'd recommend playing with regex to help transform content into something original.
For instance, you could search for industry abbreviations CW and replace with long forms _**Clockwise (CW). **_Maybe they over use an adjective that you could changeto your own voice.
Also, perhaps the stock descriptions have blocks of useless content you could strip out in the mean time?
The DB probably has a few other fields (name, product attributes etc) so be sure to find a unique way of assembling the meta description, title and details.
If you find enough to change, I'd think having the description would be better then having a page that is too light on words.
Be sure to mark up with http://schema.org/Product so SE's understand the nature of the content.
EDIT: I have used the regex technique to enhance the content of a database by added inline tooltips, diagrams or figures and glossary links. However with Penguin, I would be careful with automated links. You would only want to create a handful using the same anchor text.
EDIT2: I forgot - MAKE FREQUENT BACK UPS. Regex is super powerful and can tank a database really fast. Make a backup of the original and of every successful iteration - it will take a little longer but it will save your butt when things go bad.
-
I would say use the content as is (regular text) and work on adding additional content on top of that. Most marketplaces and etailers (including Amazon) use the descriptions provided by the brands. Google understands that. The idea is to provide additional value on top of that content with things like user reviews and additional features that make your site stand out.
-
Wow, a really tough problem.
I would definitely go for the image, and then customise the copy around the image so you can still rank for those pages. If you go for noindex tags, you lose all optimisation opportunites.
Or, could you host the product description on a single domain and then link to that from all your relevant pages?
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 page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Duplicate Content based on www.www
In trying to knock down the most common errors on our site, we've noticed we do have an issue with dupicate content; however, most of the duplicate content errors are due to our site being indexed with www.www and not just www. I am perplexed as to how this is happening. Searching through IIS, I see nothing that would be causing this, and we have no hostname records setup that are www.www. Does anyone know of any other things that may cause this and how we can go about remedying it?
Technical SEO | | CredA0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Website's stability and it's affect on SEO
What is the best way to combat previous website stability issues? We had page load time and site stability problems over the course of several months. As a result our keyword rankings plummeted. Now that the issues have been resolved, what's the best/quickest way to regain our rankings on specific keywords? Thanks, Eric
Technical SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
How to resolve this Duplicate content?
Hi , There is page i get when i do proper menu navigation Caratlane.com>jewellery>rings>casualsrings> http://www.caratlane.com/jewellery/rings/casual-rings/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html When i do a site search in my search box by my product code number "JR00219" The same page is appears with different url http://www.caratlane.com/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html So there is a duplicate content. How can we resolve it. Regards, kathir caratlane.com
Technical SEO | | kathiravan0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique. Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently? I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue? Thanks Brian Clapp
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0