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Separate Panda Question

by MichaelAnthony
17 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I won't rehash the details from my last post but my site experienced a drop in rankings for my two main pages, going from #2 to #4 for one page, and #5 to #9 for another -- both at the time that Panda was refreshed, and also when all those PBNs were de-indexed (from which I did have a handful of links).

But anyway, this question is related to the layout of my site, and whether I'm hurting myself with "duplicate content" of my own doing.

Let's say my site is one big resource page about toothbrushes -- and on it I have several paragraphs of text which is basically a "buyer's guide", plus full "reviews" of the top 10 toothbrushes on the market. All on that one page that I'm targeting as my keyword, "best toothbrushes".

However, what I did was create individual posts for each toothbrush review and published them on my site, and they are word-for-word the same reviews that are on my resource page.

So I have an individual post called "Orbal B Toothbrush Review", and the text for that review is pulled directly from my main resource page -- which, again, contains reviews for 10 toothbrushes. And I have 10 total individual review posts that do this very same thing.

My question is -- by doing this, am I creating duplicate content on my site that may be triggering Panda? Should I simply "no-index" those individual posts/reviews, so they don't look like duplicates from my main resource page?

(The reason I have them in the first place is that I have a comparison chart on my resource page, and one of the columns is titled "review" -- and I link directly to those reviews from that comparison chart; and people actually click on them, so they can read the review of just *that* toothbrush, instead of having to read the entire resource page).

Hope that makes sense.
#panda #question #separate
  • Profile picture of the author Adam Roy
    That's definitely duplicate content.

    Maybe try re-writing the main article pages so they are completely unique. You could try using your giant "resource" page to include simple "summaries" of the full articles. Maybe even link to the full article for each one.

    Just an idea.

    You're definitely creating duplicate content though, and I always try to avoid that.

    If you take me up on my advice (which certainly can't hurt), build a few links to the newly rewritten articles so Google will pick up on it and see the changes. You may or may not see a rise in rankings.

    Hope that helps.
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      Thank you -- I had thought about just shortening the reviews on the main page into simple "summaries" of the review itself, as you suggested, and then linking to the individual review posts.

      Do you have any thoughts about simply "no-indexing" the individual reviews?
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Did you really call your post orbal b? Or was that only a typo here?

        It's not dupe content in that sense. In fact, it would make no sense to
        even claim that it is.

        It's how every large commerce, article, deal site, etc. does it, from amazon
        to ebay, travel sites, and everything in between.

        Paul
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        If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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  • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
    Typo

    Hmm ... so you're saying it's fine to leave as-is?
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    It's duplicate content, but only partially unique because it's not combined in the same way elsewhere along with the unique-to-that-page text.

    The most important thing to understand about it is the ratio between unique content and the duplicate content.

    Some people are really anal about dup content. Some feel having the same post on two archive pages is horrible. (CoughYukon?Cough) I don't and further more I feel my view was recently supported by Google.

    For context, a site that was hugely rewarded in the last panda only has an average of 57% unique content per page site wide, taking all visible text into account. (Sidebar, navigation, related posts, actual post content, etc...) When looking at that, is sharing a 200 character excerpt on two pages a huge deal when accompanied by hundreds of words (3-5k characters) of unique text really THAT bad?

    That having been said your situation is entire pages, not excerpts - big difference! Your 10 review pages are completely worthless dup content and are probably hurting you. I've never had to rework a situation like this so I don't know if it would be better to redo the 10 review pages to rework the main resource page.... honestly, I'd probably do both since neither sounds like it could have been well optimized for SEO or conversions.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
      Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post


      For context, a site that was hugely rewarded in the last panda only has an average of 57% unique content per page site wide, taking all visible text into account. (Sidebar, navigation, related posts, actual post content, etc...) When looking at that, is sharing a 200 character excerpt on two pages a huge deal when accompanied by hundreds of words (3-5k characters) of unique text really THAT bad?
      .
      I thought the last Panda update was a toning down of Panda, and was supposed to do that.
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  • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
    Thanks for the response!

    So I decided to re-work the main pages, to shorten up the reviews, basically just summarize them and then link out to the reviews themselves -- this still leaves me with more than 2,000 words on those main pages.

    I left the actual review posts in tact ... the thing is, most of the reviews are 250-300 words each ... now I hope that the length of the reviews itself is not yet another reason to worry about "thin" content
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Why did I win a cough?

    Anywho...

    Duplicate pages on the same domain is indeed duplicate pages, that's the very reason Google has canonical tags.

    Here's the problem with duplicate internal pages...

    Google isn't going to rank two identical content pages, Google will bury one page in Supplemental SERPs with Jimmy Hoffa. When you force Google to pick which page to bury & which page to rank your creating an unnecessary headache because odds are Google will pick the opposite page your trying to rank.

    What you should do is create unique summaries of each sales page, then link from the summary page (category page?) to the matching sales page for each individual product.

    Have a look at how Wikipedia links to relevant internal pages below each of the <h2> tags on content pages, it's all unique text summarizing a 2nd relevant internal page. Both pages are unique.

    BTW, my bet is OP lost links. Build better links.
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      "What you should do is create unique summaries of each sales page, then link from the summary page (category page?) to the matching sales page for each individual product. ... BTW, my bet is OP lost links."

      Thanks for the reply!

      Yep, that's what I did -- I re-worked the reviews on the summary page, shortening them up to making them only summaries. Then I link out to the individual reviews.

      And I hope you're right that it's a link juice issue!
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Why did I win a cough?
    It was from a previous post. I haven't had enough coffee to go find it now... I'll get all feisty later and find it, probably.
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

      It was from a previous post. I haven't had enough coffee to go find it now... I'll get all feisty later and find it, probably.
      I thought maybe you had a cold.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kilterman
    +1 to Yukon's Rel=Canonical
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    If your question is what you want answered, then again dupe content is not an issue.
    That would make no sense. (I keep repeating myself) Tons of large sites would
    go belly up, as nobody reinvents the wheel. Duplicate content is such an
    idiotic term. Of course it's the same...but it does not matter. We need a new
    word to denote the same content used over and over, which is very common.
    My gosh the WF would be first up to get dinged on that.

    Orbal B makes no sense as well. If it's a typo on your site, change it. For most
    CMS, the url cannot be changed after the title. So you would need to start over
    in most cases.

    Paul
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

      If your question is what you want answered, then again dupe content is not an issue.
      That would make no sense. (I keep repeating myself) Tons of large sites would
      go belly up, as nobody reinvents the wheel. Duplicate content is such an
      idiotic term. Of course it's the same...but it does not matter. We need a new
      word to denote the same content used over and over, which is very common.
      My gosh the WF would be first up to get dinged on that.

      Orbal B makes no sense as well. If it's a typo on your site, change it. For most
      CMS, the url cannot be changed after the title. So you would need to start over
      in most cases.

      Paul
      Thanks! I just thought the timing of my drop in SERPS was awfully coincidental with Panda, so I've just been looking for explanations.

      And "Orbal B" is just a typo I made in my post above, not on my actual site -- which is not about toothbrushes. Was just using an example.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lyanna
    OP, the relevant thing here is that you still rank highly. #4 and #9 is still on the first page of the SERPs so I suggest that if you make changes, do it slowly. Don't revamp your entire website in one day. Change a page or two then wait for results before changing something again.
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      Originally Posted by Lyanna View Post

      OP, the relevant thing here is that you still rank highly. #4 and #9 is still on the first page of the SERPs so I suggest that if you make changes, do it slowly. Don't revamp your entire website in one day. Change a page or two then wait for results before changing something again.
      Thanks! Yep, I've been making some small tweaks. I moved my comparison chart (which contains Amazon links) a little further down the page, so the affiliate links are not so blatantly "above the fold". I've also reduced the total number of Amazon links on those two pages, down from 30 each (which was probably too many) to just 10 each now. I also built some high PR back links.

      And today one KW moved from #4 to #3, so we're headed in the right direction.
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