Similar pages on a site

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking.

if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google?

Thanks in Advance for any tips.

Andy

[blakewenloe]

I think the concept is more geared towards content than it is the URL but if you've got a jumper category with short descriptions and a blog focused on just expanding those descriptions, I can see how it might not be a safe route.

If it's a more informative "how to" type blog, I don't see any risk of detrimentally similar content, but it's best to keep URLs unique. It wouldn't hurt to make the blog categories/posts a bit more specific in the URL and title tags.

For example:

example.com/blog/category/jumpers-installation-how-to

VS.

example.com/blog/category/jumpers

That helps keep URLs clearly unique.

[TimHolmes]

Is the content the same though for the two sections?

For me if one is about jumper products you sell and the other about reviews of jumpers, I think they do very different things, but I can see there will be an overlap and you want to elimate this to Google has a clear definition of both.

Could you not implement to different schema types. One for blog related listing articles etc and one tailored towards product schema, hopefully this will help google to determine the sections a little better.

If however, they are in effect the same pages and content why not implement a series of rel canonicals to the preferred more important pages.

Hope that helps

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I'm simply going to re-emphasize what others have said here: it's more important how similar the content is than anything else. "Jumpers" is certainly broad enough that you can attack it from several different content angles. If your website sells jumpers, it's not unusual to have multiple pages about jumpers.

The key is that every page should serve a specific purpose. If this isn't the case, work to find ways to either:

1. Consolidate or
2. Make the purpose of each page uniquely valuable.

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.