What constitutes duplicate content?

[ChatterBlock]

I have a website that lists various events.  There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012.  It will probably happen again sometime in the future too.  Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details.

In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag.  I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content.

I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work.  Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?

[jeffreytrull1]

You could use the Rel="canoncial" tag but that will affect your search rankings.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Are people actually searching for each month separately? If not, this might not be much of a concern.

Could you create a page that lists all the dates and that would be a where you could point the Rel="canoncial" tag to?

[ChatterBlock]

Thx for the reply.

The events come up as separate instances when people are browsing our site.  E.g., they browse all upcoming events at a certain swimming pool (rec center), and get a listing with a brief overview.  Then they can click on an event details page.  1 event details page per event.

E.g., http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/12/crystal-pool-and-fitness-centre-victoria-bc/events/

From a user experience, this works great.  question was asked because I don't want to be penalized for having duplicate content.

[RyanKent]

Duplicate content is determined when a significant percentage of the content (i.e. the words on the page) is duplicated on another web page. Sorry if that seems too obvious but that's the definition. I am not sure what percentage SEOmoz or Google uses to determine duplicate content but based on your description it sounds like 90%+ of the content is duplicated.

Some options:

1. Add unique content to the page. Work to ensure at least 50% of the content is unique to the page. You can share information specific to the month involved. A Christmas pool party might be cold and you can talk about the holiday involvement. You can share images from the prior year's event, experiences from participants, etc.

2. Move the content to a single page. You can offer a single event page with information about each month the event is held.

3. You can maintain a single active page at a time. After the December event is over you can remove the page, publish the March 2012 page and 301 redirect the December URL to the March page.

4. You can canonicalize the various versions to a single page. If you take this step it is important to keep track of the indexed page version.

5. You can noindex all except one of the pages.

I suggest the above options are in order of preference. The first option will likely yield the best results. If you are not willing to go with that option, try the second option, and so forth.

[ChatterBlock]

You rock!

[seoug_2005]

Hi Ryan,

What about a site in 3 different languages Targetting 3 countries with same content ?

Would Google consider it as duplicate content.

Thanks

[RyanKent]

Hi Atul,

Different languages is NOT seen as duplicate content. If you take the same article and present it in both English and Spanish, that would be considered two unique articles.