Homepage Duplicates

[matbennett]

I'm not 100% sure I've understood the enquiry properly, so let me recap what I think it is.

Your category pages pull a list of results for each category. You homepage pulls results from across all of your categories.  Each of these results links to its own unique page.  You are worried that your homepage and categories will be seen as duplicates as they are pulling from the same pool of results?  Is that correct?

This should be OK.  Your categories will all have content that is distinct from the others.  Your homepage should have it's own mix of them and at least be different enough not to cause you a problem.  I don't think that the duplicate element is an issue, but I do think that you are making it quite hard for search engines to understand what your pages are about.

For example: http://www.icrewz.com/find-equipment/

Presumably you would like to be ranking for terms related to finding filming equipment.  There is not much on the page to help the search engines (or users!) understand that. Some unique text on the page ("Film crews across the US use icrewz to find studio and filming equipment to hire. Optionally enter you Zip code to see filming equipment in your chosen area ")... etc etc.   Doing that on each of the category pages would help them stand out.

Likewise some form of explanation on the home page would likely help humans and bots alike.

[SanjidaKazi]

Hi Stephen

It doesn't look to me as though you will have an issue with duplicate content. You could set your "Verification" pages to noindex in your Wordpress if that is what you're referring to?

As Leonie mentioned, install Yoast.

[icrewz]

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[icrewz]

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[icrewz]

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[SanjidaKazi]

Are you using Wordpress? I'm not a web developer so my knowledge is limited unless you are. Looking at your reply to Leonie I'll assume you are:

I took this screenshot for you. So long as you have Yoast installed you should see about half way down the page itself Yoast plugin > Advanced > ** See screenshot **

In terms of where to access those pages I'm guessing they will be under your "pages" section?

giTTcc9.png

[icrewz]

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[SanjidaKazi]

Personally I would noindex as its only a page with a captcha on it, so its not really supplementary to your websites ranking in my opinion.

Someone with more experience would be better answering that though.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Just wanted to check in and see if you are all set with this? I looked and things seem to be OK, so maybe it's been updated since posting the question.

[icrewz]

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[evolvingSEO]

Hi Stephen

Can you clarify what is telling you the homepage is the only one with SEO? The Yoast plugin? What is extracting the info?

Unfortunately I am unable to help offline, but if you leave a reply explaining a little more what you mean myself or another Moz Associate will be sure to help!

-Dan

[icrewz]

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[evolvingSEO]

Stephen

Ahh I see. This is a bit of a different question. I think you are asking "why do my inner pages not rank, and why does only my homepage rank"?

I think we should zoom out and look at more the concepts of "keyword targeting" and site architecture.

This can get pretty involved, and would be an entire blog post - but here's a few resources to check out first:

• http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization
• http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/01/31/keyword-targeting-mistakes/
• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/site-structure-enhance-seo/

To rank for "film crew jobs los angeles" the site needs a really dedicated page about that specific topic, that has information about that topic better than other websites out there. The site current does not it seems, so the homepage is ranking instead because Google does not have a better option to rank for that keyword.

This doesn't have much to do with _how _the page is created, if it's a CMS, category page, etc - if the end result is a page that serves that search then you will have a much better chance of ranking it.

Then you need to be sure you have an intuitive site architecture - this post is pretty good about that: http://www.seobook.com/getting-site-architecture-right