Unavoidable duplicate page

[Stuart26]

Hi,

I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g.

domain.com/service1/product-x

domain.com/service2/product-x

Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Stuart

[crackingmedia]

Hi Stuart

Is product-x just one component in each of these services along with other components?

If so, could you not solve this by having content on each of the service pages about those services and then a small amount of info about product-x on each of those pages with a read more type link to product-x on the actual product-x page.

So you would have:

domain.com/service1
domain.com/service2

both of which point to a page showing product-x at domain.com/product-x

If that is not possible then there isn't a way around having duplicate pages as I can see it.

Peter

[Stuart26]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your response. I probably should have said but I have vastly simplified the description of this problem. Product-x is actually made of lots of components and sub pages within itself. Which is the reason I can't re-write product-x for each service section.

So there will be lots of duplicate pages within each product-x section. The service 1 and 2  sections are unique however.

Stuart

[Ikusa]

So if you have to FORCE the engines to prioritize one of multiple duplicates, you have a few options.  Assuming you want both pages to exist, you can provide a nofollow or noindex rule to one of the duplicates.  This is a blunt approach which works well but not really the coolest.

The coolest option is to give one a canonical tag.  Telling the engines that one of the multiple duplicates is the "canonical" one is what Google even recommends (and it has all sorts of neat downstream SEO benefits anyway.

So add a "rel canonical" tag to the "proper" page.  Matt lays it out here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Let us know how it goes!

[Stuart26]

That DOES sound cool...

So will that also work for any sub-sections within the product-x section too? I probably should have mentioned but product-x has a sub set of pages which arn't unique e.g.

domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-1

domain.com/service1/product-x/product-x-details-2

domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-1

domain.com/service2/product-x/product-x-details-2

Stu

[Ikusa]

Tentative yes.  If the subsections are different "pages" it should work the same.

However, since you aren't specific with the URLs, I can't visit the pages to see how exactly appropriate this is.  I've optimized thousands of paginated and product pages with this problem, and rel-canonicaling (yes I made up that verb) them worked best for us.  If you'd like a more accurate answer, feel free to share example URLs for me to poke around in.

[Stuart26]

The content in the 'details' subsections are identical between service 1 and 2, but the details sections aren't identical within their own service sections. Anyone confused yet?! I'm really sorry I can't share any links of the site, it's currently still in development.

Stu

[Ikusa]

It's okay, we all just want to give you the best answer we can.  It can be tough without specifics to give you actionable advice, but I'll keep trying!

My gut feeling here (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that if there is any appreciable difference in content (as you indicate above), then the dupe content thing may not be a problem.  This sort of problem only exists for pages with multiple urls (like in more than one subdomain) or old mirrors that were never taken down and such.  If you offer similar services with alot of the same content but slightly different service sections, you shouldn't be flagged for dupes.

Why not skip any tactics for now, get the site launched, remove the older content, and use Moz to run a crawl and see if any further content is flagged?  Sounds to me like this is a borderline dupe content issue and may not really be a problem for the engines.  I don't think I can really say until the pages are live.  Let us know when they are!

[Stuart26]

Thanks for your help with this. In the end we decided to go down the nofollow route after consulting the developer with your suggestions.

Stu