Duplicate Content
-
Hi All,
I am doing work for a rug company that acts as a third party. They have close to 4,000+ products.
Each rug belongs to a collection. The collection has one main description that is the same throughout every rug in the collection.
Ex. One Collection has 15 rugs, all with the same description.
Should I take the time and change every single description? I think the answer is yes but I wanted another opinion.
Thanks
-
Hard to say if they are taking a 'hit' of any kind. Just from checking Rugs USA, while there is some duplicate content the different product pages are not identical (there are different product titles, images, size options, prices, reviews, etc) so there may not be enough to consider it a 'duplicate content'. To be safe, you always want things like descriptions to be unique, and not duplicate, but that in and of itself may not be enough to draw the duplicate content penalty.
-
The Google algorithms are very complex. There are many factors that are taken into account for Google ranking positions like trusted backlinks, age of site, percentage of healthy content, schema markup and more. New sites have a barrier to entry and must prove they are worthy of being shown in the SERPS.
-
I checked Rugs USA. They are using Canonical Tags to point to a general page for like products. They are also using the Schema Product tags that Irving suggested. I do not believe they are taking a hit - they took the time to set it all up.
-
Look at above comment under jStong
-
They are different rugs. However, when I look at competing websites like Rugs USA or Rugs direct they have the same content spread across multiple pages as well.
Do they just take the hit?
-
Just to add a little bit to the previous responses. Assuming each rug is truly different, then you could have on each product page: a general paragraph about the collection and an unique paragraph about each individual product. I would advise using schema tags (http://schema.org/IndividualProduct) and try to figure out which fields can truly be unique per item. Unique photos and videos for your products is also helpful in providing uniqueness to your pages. I realize that 4k is a lot of product to have unique descriptions and you can noindex non-unique pages until you update them.
-
Hello,
Are they different rugs or just a variation of the same rug? If they are different, then ideally yes, each product should have its own description. If they are a variation then you should look to consolidate these pages into one and make the differences into options for that particular rug.
Hope that helps.
-
If by collection you mean sizes, then I would move all of the sizes for one collection on the same page and use a drop down to have people select the sizes. That would give you the best benefit without risking thin or duplicate content.
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
-
Community Discussion - Pitches from content marketers versus publicists: any difference?
Howdy, Moz community! Hope you're all having a fine Friday so far! Tuesday on the blog we featured Samuel Scott's superpowered "Advanced Guide to Online Publicity Campaigns." One interesting tidbit stood out to me as I was reading; the author states: On online marketing websites and blogs, I see pitching often being discussed by "content marketers" as a way to gain shares of and links to one thing or another. They should stop. I receive e-mailed pitches from PR executives and "content marketers" all the time — and I can tell within three seconds which one I'm getting. How? Here is the difference between the two. "Content marketers" pitch me: 1.) To share or link to some random article, and they do so often when
Content Development | | FeliciaCrawford
2.) I have no connection to or interest in the topic at all Publicists pitch me: 1.) To write about an idea because
2.) They already know that I have a connection to or interest in that topic I ignore or delete the pitches from "content marketers." Following the pitches from publishers, I may choose to include their source, study, or idea in some future piece in the publications to which I contribute. Most "link earning" methods are poor imitations of traditional publicity practices. Pitch in a way that will genuinely interest the people who you are contacting. Do not pitch thinly-veiled attempts to get links and shares for you or your clients. I definitely get these emails fairly regularly, but I've never given thought to just what it is that makes me respond positively to some and decline others. So here's my discussion question for the week: What's the distinction for you? Have you noticed that, in your own pitches, you've had a better reception to a certain strategy? Does the "publicist" angle work better in your experience, or have you had plenty of luck with the "content marketer"-type pitch? What do you actually find yourself responding to, in these situations?9 -
Can I post my MailChimp articles on my blog without getting hit for duplicate content?
I would like to post my newsletters on my blog, but am afraid of duplicate content since you can click a link on the MailChimp email blast to view the Newsletter online. Is this considered dup content?
Content Development | | RoxBrock0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i have a serious problem. I work in joomla and sometimes it can be annoying. When you set up a category, you need to give it a name and maybe this is a huge error on my part as i did not really think about the names beforehand. The situation i have now is, all my sections are in front page mode, but because you have to name the categories in order to write articles, i am now left with a load of blog sections such as http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news Now i have a main section called Benidorm news so i have duplicate sections, i want to know if i can redirect the http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news to go to the main benidorm section or if there is a better way of doing it. i have left this blod layout the way it is to show you, but the others i just have it where it shows the title and then goes to the article. I work in k2 and would be grateful if anyone can let me know the solution to this as semoz is showing that i have many duplicate titles and content many thanks
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Content Duplication for Job Posting
Hello! I am responsible for SEO of a job portal of a recruitment agency. We get 30-40 jobs every month which we post on a) our job portal b) other job portals (like monster, career builder, Naukri , etc). How do avoid content duplication? We can only post the same job descriptions everywhere. We always post the job on our site first and then the other job portals**. How to ensure that Google knows our portal is the original job posters and not other job portals.** Thank you.
Content Development | | peoplesutra0 -
Is this duplicate content?
I'm optimizing a Magento site and have a question regarding duplicate content. Currently, you can dig down to an individual product listings with URLs similar to this: (1) http://www.foo.com/category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/item.html However, we also have a "Top 50" area, with a link to the same page; however, the URL for that page is: (2) http://www.foo.com/item.html Both are dynamic, so a static page for (2) with different content is out of the question. I asked IT to have both (1) and (2) point to exactly the same page, within the same categor(ies), but they said I would have choose one or the other So, here are my questions: Will Google consider the pages to be duplicates of each other, and thus incur a penalty; If I were to choose one structure, which would be the "friendliest?" I've think I've come across questions similar to this in Q&A, but haven't been able to locate them; so, I'm sorry to be posting a "duplicate question." I've been busy writing completely different product descriptions, nice and deep and value-rich, for more than 300 items and categories and am only now starting to look at current SEO protocols; I'm hoping to ask Google for a site reevaluation in another 2 weeks or so. Thanks.
Content Development | | RScime250 -
RSS feeds with dup content and titles
Hi, For my Buddypress site I use a tool to create sites with RSS feeds. Each site is for a different feed, but the number of dup tiles and content is running in the thousands. I've been trying to reduce the dups, but have begun to think there is more trouble from such content than benefit. Should I dump the content or ignore the errors flagged by SEOMOZ? Any ideas if thes RSS feed dups are hurting my BuddyPress site? Any suggestions in general about how to eliminate such dupe for a Buddypress Site, eg. the activity log. Larry
Content Development | | tishimself0 -
How can i solve duplicate problem with different url needed?
My client is a big international firm with 10 websites with different url (.co.uk, .com, .com.au, .pl... etc). All websites are exactly the same except the price. I suggested them to only use .com and use region as a sub domain like au.xxx.com instead of xxx.com.au. However they cannot do that for some reason. I am trying to solve the duplicate issue. I dont think i can use 301 redirect or canonial link because all regions are making even traffics. Any suggestions?
Content Development | | ringochan0 -
Help with Content Revamp
Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused. We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful. I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles. As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for -Longboard Surfboards -Funboard Surfboards -Mini Malibu Surfboards -Retro Fish Surfboards -Womens Surfboards -Beginner Surfboards My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words? What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?
Content Development | | isle_surf0