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Site with lots of duplicate content - how to keep focus?

by cachophrastus
3 replies
Hi,

This is my site seignaletplus with awful SEO and about 30 hits a day) that I am having revamped in Wordpress. I have asked the developers (who have no clue about SEO but are very skilled programmers - ask me how I know) to add the Yoast plugin.

The site is about how a French professor of medicine put 91 chronic "incurable" diseases into remission with a special diet. He produced tables with results for each disease: 100% remission, 80/90% etc. etc.

I have made a separate "disease page" for each of the 91 disease with his results for that disease at the top. The disease pages have been populated using a script with the same content on each page with the name of the disease inserted in the relevant places and with Seignalet's results for that disease at the top. (On the site in development I have new content for the disease pages but still added with a script.) Over the coming months I will gradually add custom copy to each disease page. I will also add new pages for that disease so the existing disease page becomes a sort of landing page. My idea is that if someone searches for "Can Acne be reversed" for example they will see a result in the SERP for that search and go to the disease page for Acne. I am also shooting youtube videos showing me making Seignalet legal recipes. I will load them to youtube when I have a good playlist of about 15 or 20 and then add one new one every week.

But how to I keep the focus on the user's search? At the moment I'm on about the 4th SERP for each disease. I want to be no. 1 on page no. 1 . Is the answer to do something with a site map and robots.text file? With my dayjob site we did both of these to ignore anything that was not directly relevant to the search term that brings 99% of my customers and this had an immediate effect on my ranking. (I also tightened up the heading, using H1 instead of some other useless tag that looked pretty and made sure it was in the meta title and meta description.) Should I be using a canonical tag? If so, how?

Incidentally, I looked at 2 competitors, healthline and mercola and they don't seem to be using robots.text. (Edited to correct: they do - I missspelled /robots.text) healthline seems to be very savvy about SEO from what I can gather with my limited knowledge of the subject.

Cheers Chris
#content #duplicate #focus #lots #site
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  • Profile picture of the author professorrosado
    As I see all the sites that result before yours actually have information about the condition referenced. Yours doesn't - as you have your script presenting the same content over and over again: surely at a cost to your position.


    If you are resulting within the first 4 pages, that's quite an accomplishment considering the state of your articles.

    It looks like you were rushing to populate the site either exacerbated by the disconnect between you and the "development" process and/or other factors. Usually one builds up the blog adding articles and promoting the articles, building traffic and shares but you are going express.

    In the end, you will still have to address each "disease" post individually for your best results overall.

    For now the canonical tag is your remedy and hopefully you should see a better position soon.
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  • Profile picture of the author thongim
    Hi, Chris

    Unfortunately, the design of your site looks like it was made in the 90s and has not been updated since then.
    Perhaps visitors think this is an old site and close it. This increases refusal rate and reduces Google ranking.
    Have you thought about choosing a more interesting theme?
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  • Profile picture of the author brettb
    I've had a lot of success by removing any post that doesn't get a lot of search referal traffic. I think too many sites are weighed down by junk. It's kind of a 80/20 rule - cull 80% of your pages and focus on the 20% that are getting traffic.
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