Solutions for duplicate content ?

by A S M
9 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hi all

I'm currently undergoing an SEO audit for our company and I have been looking into duplicate content .

I'm using copyscape (seems to work very well for me) and I noticed that there are many pages of ours that have duplicate content with other competitors in my country.

Whats the best way to overcome this problem ?

The best solution i can think of (and please correct me if i'm wrong) is to add all duplicate content to a pdf file and upload it to the relevant page(so the user has the option to download it and Google doesn't crawl it). Also , to add a few paragraphs of unique content on each page that I created a pdf, briefly explaining what the pdf and that page is all about.

Thanks in advance,

Aris
#content #duplicate #solutions
  • It really depends on what the content is. If it is technical or legal descriptions or other standard items like that, you don't have a problem. Google has very publically said that these types of things can (and should) be duplicated across sites.

    If it is 'regular' content for your site, and you (or someone in your company) copied it from another company, you should remove it and write your own. Or at least get permission, and put a link back to the other site.

    If other companies stole the content from you without permission, contact them and request that they have it removed.

    Hopefully that helps.

    Michael
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    • Profile picture of the author A S M
      Thanks for your reply

      I didn't know Google announced such a thing.

      The content duplicated is general information about various laws i.e tax and vat planning in Cyprus. So according to your comments, this shouldn't have any effect to my site for duplicate content.

      My main concern is, that some of those pages that have heavy duplicates, are actually some pages we require to do SEO because they acquire our main keywords.

      What then ?

      Thanks

      Aris
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  • Yeah. You can read about it at the link below, and also see the video where Matt Cutts talks about it. (Matt is the head of search engine spam at Google).
    Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content is OK in Some Cases

    Regarding what to do, I'm not really sure what to tell you without looking at the pages specifically. Plus, I'm far from an SEO expert because it isn't the best way to get targeted traffic for most sites. I'm sure other people can jump in and give you better tips if you share the site your concerned about.

    Michael
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  • Profile picture of the author A S M
    Thanks Michael

    Here you go guys,

    http://www.savvacyprus.com/OurServices/InternationalTaxPlanning.aspx

    This is one example of one of our pages that has duplicate content but also is a main keyword for our targeted traffic. Any suggestions on how you would optimize this page for SEO ? Please review my idea on the first post of this thread.

    Thanks

    Aris
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Forget Copyscape If your trying to rank pages in Google, Google doesn't own or care about Copyscape.

    Here's how you check duplicate pages on the same domain & yes, you do have duplicate content as you can see in the Supplemental SERP link at the bottom of the search results (link below).

    "precisely set out a strategy to mitigate your ongoing liability both in Cyprus"

    Use canonical tags to tell Google which duplicate page is important.
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    • Profile picture of the author dreamtoreality
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Forget Copyscape If your trying rank pages in Google, Google doesn't own or care about Copyscape.

      Here's how you check duplicate pages on the same domain & yes, you do have duplicate content as you can see in the Supplemental SERP link at the bottom of the search results (link below).

      "precisely set out a strategy to mitigate your ongoing liability both in Cyprus"

      Use canonical tags to tell Google which duplicate page is important.
      What about category pages containing excerpts? Do you just noindex these or let them be?
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  • Profile picture of the author A S M
    You amaze me Yukon and thanks for your help

    How did you do that search ?
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by AriSEO Savva View Post

      You amaze me Yukon and thanks for your help

      How did you do that search ?
      I took a random snippet of text from the web page/link you posted above & searched the phrase in double quotes on Google.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by dreamtoreality View Post

    What about category pages containing excerpts? Do you just noindex these or let them be?
    You can do a few different things:

    1) Create a unique content page on your blogs theme file, example for Wordpress would be category.php in your theme templates. All you have to change is the code that loops the blog post snippets.

    You could have a category page with nothing except internal links (blog post title/hyperlinks).

    You could turn the category page into a mini sales page, with links pointing to the rest of the blog post in the same category.

    If each one of your blog post has an image, you could make the category page all clickable images pointing to each blog post.

    Really it depends on the site how you display content on the category page, each site/niche is unique & has different types of traffic. A category page is no different than any other web page, you just have to make the theme template on the blog display whatever it is you want displayed on the live web page (category page).

    2) You could noindex the category page, not something I personally would do. The category page is the mother of all pages for each group of pages in that category, no reason to not have that category page indexed in Google SERPs.

    3) Like already mentioned you could use a canonical tag to tell Google which page is most important, just keep in mind Google will probably dump the other duplicate pages into Supplemental SERPs.
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