What constitutes a duplicate page?

[BusBoyNZ]

Hi, I have a question about duplicate page content and wondered if someone is able to shed some light on what actually constitutes a "duplicate". We publish hundreds of bus timetable pages that have similar, but technically with unique urls and content. For example http://www.intercity.co.nz/travel-info/timetable/lookup/akl

The template of the page is oblivious duplicated, but the vast majority of the content is unique to each page, with data being refreshed each night.

Our crawl shows these as duplicate page errors, but is this just a generalisation because the urls are very similar? (only the last three characters change for each page - in this case /akl)

Thanks in advance.

[FedeEinhorn]

My first guess is: if the information of the page is updated because the previous details are no longer valid, why not removing the old page entirely?

Anyway, removing or leaving the info there shouldn't cause any problem, the content isn't the same. But I guess for some days data does match previous dates, therefore my idea of removing the old (useless) time tables.

[MoosaHemani]

Not sure if I understand it correctly...I think you are saying that you create a new page every night for the new schedule! I mean if this is the case then why not you just simply refresh the information on the same page as technically Google will love it and duplication issue will be reduced to none.

[BusBoyNZ]

Hi Moosa, yes we refresh the data feed to the timetable page each night although in most cases the data does not change. What we can't understand is why the SEOMOZ crawl flags these pages as duplicates?

[BusBoyNZ]

Thanks Federico, the page is republished each night to capture any timetable or stop changes. We just can't figure out why it is being tagged as duplicate content?

[FedeEinhorn]

While you visit those pages that SEOMoz tags as duplicate, is the content duplicate? If it isn't, then there's nothing to worry about.

We have duplicate content notices too, and those are usually tag pages that at a certain moment have the same posts within the listing as all those posts use the same tag.

It would be great if you post a couple pages that are reporting duplicate content and where it can be found so we can take a look at that.