Nuanced duplicate content problem.

[naymark.biz]

Hi guys,

I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something.

Situation:

The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B.

• Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance.
• Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword.

Plan:

New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so...

Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[ninjamarketer]

As a general rule, a content is considered duplicate if it matches 60% or more to the original content. Seems like in your case you have a 75-80% match which could result in duplicate content issue.

Canonicalization is a good idea and will prevent you from facing penalties / other issues.

[eyepaq]

I had a similar issue.

My solution was to add a blog like comment box so users can post public questions and comments (facebook has a good feature for this that you can implement within the site).  Of course every page (or most of the pages) needs a jump start more or less but in time the effort can prove to be worth the trouble.

It's a very big problem if most of the site is in the situation described by you and since your % of duplicate is more then half of your pages that can rise some serious issues.

If you do choose to go with  a comment feature try adding within the first posts some outgoing quality do follow links (based on the page resources - of course try not to link to your competition but q and a from yahoo, wikipedia and so on can help). It's a proven fact, as far as i know and based on tests on our end that it can help the ranking very well. (overall it's good to have a user generated look and feel that is why i've sugested to post those within the comment boxe).

Hope it helps - Take care !

[naymark.biz]

Thanks for the reply. While this will not work for this client (comments just wouldn't make sense here), it's a good idea to try in general.

[naymark.biz]

Thanks for the reply. That validates my plan of action.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Dmitriy,

I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Can you let us know what you ended up doing and how it worked out, and any helpful advise you have for anyone that's subscribed to this thread?

Thanks!