How to deal with duplicate content when presenting event and sub-events information?

[ahotu]

Hi,

I'm have a sport event calendar website.
It presents events that may have multiple races.
The event has its own page as well as the races.

example :
Event: /event/edinburgh-marathon-festival

Races:
/race/emf-half-marathon
/race/emf-10-km
/race/edinburgh-marathon
/race/emf-5-km

The pages may have a lot of information in common (location, date, description) and they all link to each other.
What would be the best practices to avoid having the pages considered duplicate content by Google?

Thanks

[GaryVictory]

Ok, I hope this is going to be helpful, but I have created two options for you...

• Option 1: Create unique descriptions for each page if you can? 
  This will take some time and probably a lot of investment. I've experienced this before with clients who always seem to write something very similar for each description, so be very careful with this.
• Option 2: OR, Canonicalize all the variations your ' race event' product  - what is the best marketable page?
  I highly recommend you use the canonical tag to tell search engines that you are fully aware that these 'similar' products are using the same info descriptions, as well as heading etc (if they are). This will help you to keep everything the same for your users, and the bonus is, you do not have to rewrite any new product copy, and... of course this will help avoid getting 'dropped' by search engines. Do this by looking at Google Analytics, what page is working for you, what needs improving? Your analysis will help to create a canonical tag that uses that URL. You should then drop this same tag into allthe products in the set, including the your best page after working out which is working for you (canonical tags can be self referential causing zero problems).

[JaneCopland]

Hi Jean-Loup,

I like Gary's idea for canonicalisation as long as you are not too concerned about search traffic that is specifically dedicated to finding information about (for example), the Edinburgh Marathon 5km race. If the 5km race page is canonicalised to the main marathon page and that main marathon page doesn't mention the 5km, your ranking chances are fairly poor.

One other option to consider is presenting this additional information as tabbed content on the main page. Without seeing the actual pages, it's hard to say what this would look like, but essentially you'd have a primary page that lists all the main info about the event, then has tabs in a secondary navigation that use CSS to show content about the 10km, the 5 and the half marathon. You clearly do not have to repeat the general information about the full marathon festival event on each of these tabs, just include information about the specific races. All the HTML about each event is presented in the source code of the one Edinburgh marathon festival page.

This is not considered underhanded or "cloaking" - it's a common way to present information on the same or very similar topic on one URL. As long as the content behind each tab is highly relevant to the original topic (e.g. the marathon and other races) and is not unduly long (don't try to post a 1,000 word blog post in a tab), you will be fine.

This might be a big stylistic undertaking, but it's another option and it also means that just one URL receives the benefit of all the links people point to the event page.

[ahotu]

Thank you for your explanations. I'll give the canonical tag a try. As I have more than 20 000 races, It's impossible for me to create unique descriptions. Most races don't have one.

I'll start by adding the canonical tag on the race pages, linking to the corresponding event page.

[ahotu]

I like your idea of regrouping on information on one page. My only concern is that the race page has already tabs and that it will lower the number of page vues for the site. As the site revenues come from advertisement  ...

Thanks