Duplicate Content vs Ideal URLs

4 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hi all,

I have a question pertaining to duplicate content and the benefit vs penalty for my specific situation:

I sell the exact same products for 3 different programs, so I was using a unique URL for each product... for example:

example.com/products/platform1/productX
example.com/products/platform2/productX
example.com/products/platform3/productX

The content of each page is about 90-95% identical, with only a very small difference in one of the sections of the product description. Each product description is 2,000+ words, so they are lengthy and the vast majority of it is duplicate content.

My questions are the following:

1) Will this be seen as "duplicate content" by google or is changing just 5-10% enough to avoid that?

2) Is using the 3 unique URLs helping me a lot in SEO since people always search for the names of the "platforms" and having them in the URL triggers them for search engines?

3) What is my best bet for handling this? Should I keep things as are and accept a duplicate content penalty so that I can keep the URLs ideal for search engines...or should I combine the 3 URLs into 1 to avoid the duplicate content penalty? (e.g. www.example.com/products/productX)

My new website is still in the development phase so I am trying to figure this out beforehand. Thanks for any suggestions or help!

- Z
#content #duplicate #ideal #seo #urls
  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    It's hard to say but most likely it's duplicate and google will only rank 1 of the pages. The other 2 will likely show up under the part where it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ### already displayed."

    If that occurs when the site is live you will have to fix it, it wouldn't be a "penalty" google just wouldn't do what you want it to do. I would just do one page, one description, and then they pick the program at the bottom.

    See: https://moz.com/products/pricing
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Having 3 pages with 95% the same content will most likely have at least 2 of the 3 pages end up in Supplemental SERPs where it will never be found by traffic.

    Create unique pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author unclejoe
    Why not just concentrate on one of those pages and drive as much traffic to it as possible . Whats the difference if you have 1 page with 100 visitors or 3 pages with 33 visitors per page.
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  • Profile picture of the author zachariah21
    Thanks for the quick and helpful replies! I was leaning towards the 1 page since having 3 seems redundant...you all make good and valid arguments for 1, so I will go that route.
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