Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
From what I've seen, google is getting very touchy about any type of duplication. I have a site that has been dropping in visitors over time. I had originally done the navigation with links to all the sibling items on the page.
ie. Widgetville might have widget museums, widget hotels, widget dining, etc. Perhaps 5 to 15 items under widgetville. Previously I would have a nav bar at the bottom listing all of the choices.
However, it appears that may be causing some duplicate issues (each page having the same nav bar repeated). Also, many of my pages are my unique photos with some descriptive text. However, the ratio of nav text to real content is a bit high.
So, my thought is that I should start replacing the nav bars that I currently have with something like a
back/next bar and a back to widgetville link on all of the sub pages under widgetville.
Personally, I think from a user perspective having all the links easily available on each sub page is the better way to go. However, the trends for the site coupled with what I've seen on duplicate content penalties leads me to believe that the back/next/return is the better way to go.
I'd appreciate any thoughts..
thanks
cg
Many well ranking URLs have large duplicate header/footer content. All other things aside, the ratio of unique content in the middle is the 'kicker'.
I have a e-retail site that suffers from the duplicate content problem because of the common elements and frankly there is only so much you can say about a particular product.
I have looked at several options, but as of now, I have decided to do what is right for my user.
Sure, I could use a few methods to lessen the percentage of duplicate content on each page, but it would probably hurt sales conversions. So with that in mind, what's the point....it would be nothing more than a trade off.
Googlers may be smart enough to try and index the web and they might think they can provide people with the most relevent results......that is unless it comes to ecommerce. Amusing to think all those millionare Phd's can not over come this little technical challenge.
It is also possible that recognizing e-commerce sites from mega-wad spam sites is more difficult than it looks. If I was trying to spam the results with thin content, I would copy the ecommerce sites that were doing well with thinner content.
It is much easier for Google to offer pages with heavy content, which is harder to fake.
Being exclusively an e-commercer, I have decided come to grips with this fact and deal with it. Pay for hits, or add content.
I'm not sure it is productive to look at the situation from a 'right' or 'wrong' point of view. The situation is also not likely to change.
However, it appears that may be causing some duplicate issues (each page having the same nav bar repeated). Also, many of my pages are my unique photos with some descriptive text. However, the ratio of nav text to real content is a bit high.
steveb addressed this one in a different post. Unfortunately while image pages may be completely unique simply based on the picture alone, unless there is adequate text on page that is unique coupled with a unique description meta tag, you can have pages filtered out.
I have seen lots of high ranking pages uses minimal text and the same nav bar on every page rank high and own a couple myself. Again, it seems the older and better ranking the site the more lenient Google is towards this. My suggestion is to make sure all od the descript tags on the product pages are unique, and that there is a fair amount of unique text on each product page where possible hear the top.
