ok guys. Well, Im new to this site but by no means to the web or SEO for that matter... But I have an issue that I have only just discovered on my site and am wondering if it is the reason for my sites poor Google performance (highest P11, currently P21) for my main keywords (what my site is about!) The site is a UK internet job site. it has a nice design, layout and a nice domain name That is 2 years old. It has some nice unique content in several sections I have developed for career development (articles, tools etc) All URLs are re written and SE friendly The problem? Quite a lot of the adverts that are on there by recruitment agencies are duplicate content of other adverts they have posted on another big jobsite they use Meaning we might have a serious duplicate content issue? Im not sure, all page titles are different but page descriptions (for the adverts only- are the same) This is a big limitation of the php / mysql script I have customised heavily. and because of it. I am having a new site built from the ground up, but it will not be done for at least 10 weeks and I need to get on P1 asap Any suggestions please? Is google penalising my site for the duplicate content within these pages? (most of them are indexed, as its only a block of text that is copied, not the entire page of course) Quality backlinks are coming along, but I am constantly trying to build more. Alexa (totally worthless apart from to ad buyers I know) rank is 350k... thanks
Yes, it is a big problem. I had this same problem once and the pattern is very familiar to me. If you rank very low, even for non-competitive phrases, that usually means that you have triggered a Google filter. This could be due to duplicate content or over-optimization. Over-optimization occurs when your title tags are too well aligned with the <H1>s or with the description for instance or when you have too many backlinks with the same anchor text. Duplicate content occurs when... well, you know when that occurs. To see if you've got a real issue, I would suggest using the following command in Google query bar: site:www.yoursite.com ***-view This will show you the number of your pages which are in the supplemental index. Now, do a simple site:www.yoursite.com command. Compare the 2 numbers. I will bet $100 that there isn't a difference bigger than 10 between the 2 figures. If so, then yes, you have triggered a filter.
Hi, duplicate content can kill your search engine rankings. However, the content of advertisements placed on your site is not all the search engine spiders see. The spiders see the HTML code. To reduce the effect of duplicate content, format your website by adding your own unique content so that the percentage that comes from those who are posting ads can be reduced to a smaller percentage. Alternatively, moderate the kind of advertisement content which can be time consuming.
Thanks Paul for the info Indeed, there is no differe between my sites supplemental and 'normal' results. Whic would be even worse if not for the fact that my main competitor for my regions niche also has ALL of their pages in the supps as well? i dont get it! The keyword is 5 million results. pretty competitive therefore but they are stuck to P1 on all the serps? I also tried for another large site. out of 200,000 pages they had 199,000 in the supps? Does this really signify my site is triggering a filter? hence the bad ranking.....or is google just getting C***? Thanks for the good points here. I think I am going to have to moderate the adverts, even if it takes a bit of time...
Yahoo is showing 102 links for your site and google is showing none (although it usually doesnt show them for a couple of months, and then it only shows some) still, i think people are not looking at the obvious and maybe assumed that you had incoming links since you said you know SEO. no incoming links = no rankings
Google's duplicate content filters are a joke. As long as you have SOME unique content, you're fine. As previously stated, I've had multiple sites in the top 10 for certain keywords, with nearly duplicate content. It IS easier to rank with unique, but it's not too hard to rank w/o it.
Yeah. thanks but this site is relatively new. Only completed 6 months ago PR 0. But in the Serps a good time before this. it is not an established site.....but for the last month or so I have been working on getting back links constantly.Free directory listings. ODP listing. Yahoo dir listing etc etc Google is useless at showing links and its 'links' search function does not work properly Im curious though, in a hard topic area, it is not easy to get incoming links when you have PR zero. A lot of the sites in my niche are very fussy about what PR you have got before they link to you.... A web design site I own is PR6....so I am not new to SEO, but that content is easier for people to link to. Suggestions anyone please? How do I get this turkey flying
Thats not it at all, I have scraped 100% duplicate content sites that rank page 1 for competitive words. You need to SEO better IMO.
Thanks mate Im glad its not the dupe content issue then! Does anyone have any ideas where Im going wrong with this site then please? Would much appreciate any helpful input ps/ I renewed the domain for 9 years more the other day. Hope it adds a bit more trust to G
Yes, I agree with that. Try to put some unique content on your main category pages, even if it's only 100 words. This, together with your link building efforts, should give you a considerable boost imho.
Thanks for the input. There is a lot of unique content on the site already though...in terms of different advert on every page, different title for every advert page (I cant change the description due to the custom script being **** which is why Im building an all new site at present, but I still cant see why Im not ranking better for my main keywords (sheffield jobs). The homepage content is unique, as is the content,titles and meta descriptions on the menu pages . They are not THAT competitive keywords...I wonder if I have overdone on page keywords and Im getting filtered into the supps for that?
IMO,duplicate content can really penalized your site to SE. I suggest to update your site by putting a new content.
Did you shuffle the keywords at all, or leave it raw? I normally scrape 1gb data/topic, so shuffling has always helped me dodge dupe content. Although I'm normally more worried about copyright holders than google.
I recently did a case study on duplicate content: http://kennethdreyer.com/case-study-duplicate-content/