Duplicate content issue

[jpuzakov]

Hello! We have a lot of duplicate content issues on our website. Most of the pages with these issues are dictionary pages (about 1200 of them). They're not exactly duplicate, but they contain a different word with a translation, picture and audio pronunciation (example http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas). What's the better way of solving this? We probably shouldn't disallow dictionary pages in robots.txt, right?

Thanks!

[LoganRay]

The ideal situation would be to create more unique content on these pages. You're getting duplicate errors because more than 90% of the source code on the dictionary pages is a match. When you consider the header and footer, and the other code for the template, it's the same everywhere. The dictionary pages are very thin on content, so it's not enough to differentiate. If you can, build out the content more.

Here's a few ways you might add more content to each dictionary page:

• Include a sentence (or 2) for in-context example of each word
• Game-ify it by writing a short paragraph of text where the translated word is blank and the user has to choose from a set of answers
• Add the phonetics for how to pronounce each word

[jpuzakov]

Thanks for the suggestion. Adding more content is the perfect way to deal with this. The downside for us is that we unfortunately don't have resources at the time to make such upgrades to 1000+ pages.

What about using rel=canonical? Is it possible to choose one dictionary page to be the original, and to tell Google that all the other ones are similar thus avoiding possible penalties? How would this work?

[LoganRay]

You can do that, but you should check Google Analytics to see how many organic entrances you get to these dictionary pages first. If a lot of people enter your site that way, rel=canonical is going to hurt your traffic numbers significantly. For example, when you add a canonical tag to this page (http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas) that points elsewhere, the suitcase page is going to get dropped from the index.

[jpuzakov]

Got it. We actually have plenty of organic entrances to these pages. So rel=canonical is not an option here.

And one more thing. Does it make sense to add nofollow links internally to main dictionary page(http://anglu24.lt/zodynas)? What are downsides of that? Or the negative effect might be similar to rel=canonical in our case?

[LoganRay]

Adding nofollow to links that point to dictionary pages will prevent search engines from getting there, but since the pages are in the index (and you don't want to change that) you're still facing the duplicate content issue.

I know it's a huge project to take on to add content to these pages, but it seems as though it's your only option. Perhaps you could split the project up between a few people and each update one page per day. That way it doesn't turn into a major time-suck.

[jpuzakov]

Thanks for the help!

[LoganRay]

No problem!