Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles

[mattzer]

Hi,

I've been heavily suffering from pandaitus recently and looking at this point from Google-

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

If I have pages like-

www.domain.com/blue-widget-review
www.domain.com/blue-widget-deals
www.domain.com/blue-widget-guide

As you can see I target Blue widget review, blue widget deals and blue widget guide. Based on what Google has said, I now think there needs to be 1 page that covers it all instead of 3.

What I'm wondering is the best way to deal with the situation? I think it should be something like this but please correct me along the way :)

1. Pick the strongest page out of the 3

2. Merge the content from the 2 weaker pages into the strongest

3. Update the title/meta info of the strongest page to include the KW variations of all 3 eg- Blue Widget Review, Deals & User Guide

4. Then scatter review, deals and guide throughout the text naturally

5. Then delete the weaker 2 pages and 301 redirect to the strongest page

6. Submit URL removal via webmastertools for the 2 weaker pages

What would you do to correct this situation? Am I on the right track?

[tedster]

Sounds good to me. If you have a lot of this type of situation, it just "might be" part of your fix. If you've ruled out other possibilities, it's sure worth a try.

[mattzer]

Excellent :)

Still looking for a more diverse range of opinions on the matter but I do think it needs addressing, whether thats the right way to go about it or not im not sure.

Thanks

[indyank]

From what I understand, they aren't saying that you should have only one page but the content should not be repeated i.e. each should be unique and address a different aspect.

I don't think they will go by URLs but content will matter.If you have different content on each of those pages, I don't see any reason why you should have one single page with all the content in it.

I also feel your URLs clearly suggest that they address different aspects of a topic.

Panda is crazy and don't do crazy things to satisfy panda unless you see some real problem in those pages.

[edited by: indyank at 5:18 pm (utc) on May 27, 2011]

[aakk9999]

5. Then delete the weaker 2 pages and 301 redirect to the strongest page
6. Submit URL removal via webmastertools for the 2 weaker pages

Do not do point 6 - the 301 redirect will take care of it.

[indyank]

A review isn't the same as a guide and a guide isn't the same as deals and deals isn't the same as a review.

[Planet13]

I can't say I have a definite answer, but here is one thing I would look at first:

How does google treat search queries for those terms?

If for instance, you searched for "blue widget review" would google show you ONLY results that have blue widget review in the title?

Would it also show you results that have "blue widget guide" in the title as well?

Would it also show you search results with "blue widget deals" in the title?

Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree here, but as long as I see ehow doing well despite having numerous pages with nearly identical content - save for one or two keywords - I am not sure that simply merging pages / deleting pages is the right answer...

Somehow, someway, ehow still ranks despite having pages that really should be in competition with one another - or at least filtered out as duplicate content.

[falsepositive]

I am actually in the process of redesigning pages and this is one of those big questions I have. For example, should I create different pages to address different aspects of the same topic? Or should I place them all in one page? Placing them all in one page can make that page overwhelming over time. In the past, I would create separate pages for related material. But if we are to consolidate, it can get tricky, due to the amount of material to fit in one page.

I even got so far as to think that I should create separate supporting pages to a "hub" page, but keep the separate pages noindexed until they had enough material. But some other webmasters I spoke to said this was a silly idea.

The whole Panda thing really throws a wrench on design here. It's going to influence the way we design and organize material going forward. I'd be afraid to think that we'd all be doing the same thing now because we fear this "quality factor".

[ken_b]

www.domain.com/blue-widget-review
www.domain.com/blue-widget-deals
www.domain.com/blue-widget-guide

I wonder if you risk diluting the focus of the page too much if you combine all that content onto one page?

Also might you lose the ranking of the surviving page, even if only during a re-evaluation period, because the content changed so much.

[dickbaker]

I've been thinking the same thing. I have pages for widgets on my site. Most of the widgets come in slightly different sizes. Because I plan on selling these widgets in the future (or at least that was the plan before Panda). So, each size widget has its own page.

Ecommerce sites selling these widgets have separate pages for the various sizes, and it doesn't seem to matter, even though the page content is nearly identical. For my site, though, I think it has an effect, because Google doesn't view my site as ecommerce.

Wouldn't your review, deals and guide pages be sufficiently different to satisfy Google?

[LostOne]

Thread is a bit aged but I'm wondering how people are faring with eliminating overlapping content. My problem may lie in the fact pages that were written years apart may share this problem without even realizing it.

It's more about creating new pages because a particular product or application (how to) has changed, improved, or an alternate product was created since the original page was written. Keeping in mind at the same time the original is still as important as it was before.

In order for the new page to make sense it is necessary in some cases to repeat what is characteristic of the original product or application.

[LostOne]

In looking at many of the pandalized sites at Google webmaster central and checking their page counts through the :site tool I can’t imagine how any could escape this problem. 8,000 pages …yea that’s a lot, but what about 2 million, four million? I have a hard enough time with 300.

[Hissingsid]

If 3 pages have a very similar semantic vector they may be seen as dupes. This is only likely to happen for actual dupes or generated pages with a very similar distribution of the target keywords. Or false positives.

I think that 3 well written pages with different titles, descriptions and content on different aspects of the same subject, that are linked with relevant anchor text, are more likely to be stronger overall than one well written page covering all 3 aspects of the subject.

Use stems and synonyms of your target keywords to provide a semantically richer word soup for Google.

[danijelzi]

I understand that Google's point is more related to a situation when on the same site there are articles such as "Blue Widgets Size L Review" and "Red Widget Size XL Review", where both contain very similar text, since the only difference between the products is color and size. So you have to put these separate reviews in one, like a comparison review or something.

My site that was pandalized had that kind of duplicate content issue, and i have partial success with merging similar articles into one. Now, the big problem is what you do when you have a blog about a product category, where the products are similar by default, so every review must contain almost the same text.

[Hissingsid]

Now, the big problem is what you do when you have a blog about a product category, where the products are similar by default, so every review must contain almost the same text.

If you are lazy and lack creativity you will be caught and penalised. If you write creatively and have a fresh eye on the differences between the products and use a broad vocabulary I think your site will prosper.

[LostOne]

and use a broad vocabulary

too often they can turn into fluff. Afterall how can you differentiate XL and the other without it looking like such. I can spot stuff like that a mile away.

[LostOne]

dan:

Can you elaborate on that partial success? Success in actually handling the merging or increased traffic?

[DirigoDev]

We had a situation where we let our newsletter cycle drive content creation. Because certain newsletter topics converted, we found ourselves inadvertently writing about the same topics year in and year out until we got to the point where we had 4-6 articles about a very similar topic. Each article was very well written and researched with a slightly different topic-set. When analyzing the KWs and KW phrases on these pages they appear almost duplicative. When reading the pages they were cousins. Moreover, we found ourselves using the same anchor text linking to different pages. Article soup after just 8 years and 2,000+ pages. This was not our intention. We were not farming with a capital F. All the same, Panda 2 got us.

We didn’t delete any of this content. We simply picked the top page for each subject and kept it in our navigation. We removed all hyperlinking to the other pages. If we had to hyperlink to one of these pages we rel nofollowed. We aligned all of our anchor text so that we send a clear signal to the engine that “Anchor KW Term X” points only to only “Page X”. We reworked and are still reworking ~70k internal links. We kept all of the articles in our sitemap.xml and in our site search (Google Mini) so that users could search for it. All pages are index, follow.

We had, what appears to be, a full recovery from Panda 2 on 10/14.

There is not a single piece of the website that was unchanged. Did our fix as outlined above fix Panda? No clue. It was just one of many updates. Our aim was and still is to make the best experience for the user and to develop really useful content. We think that we have a better site and stronger pages because of our changes.

Based on my experience, I’m not in favor of deleting pages and 301 redirecting.