Coupon Website Has Tons of Duplicate Content, How do I fix it?

Keith-Eneix

Ok, so I just got done running my campaign on SEOMOZ for a client of mine who owns a Coupon Magazine company. They upload thousands of ads into their website which gives similar looking duplicate content ...

like http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/100 and
http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/101.

There's about 3200 duplicates right now on the website like this. The client wants the coupon pages to be indexed and followed by search engines so how would I fix the duplicate content but still maintain search-ability of these coupon landing pages?

AlanBleiweiss

Coupon sites are just like any other ecommerce site in many ways. You want people to find things through multiple paths, yet duplicate content issues are a big negative.

Here's a few ways to address this:

Keep all the pages. A majority of its content to be unique on every page. That's a lot of editorial writing that requires significant creativity there may not be enough in the budget for.
Keep all the pages but set up nofollow filters into duplicate versions. This allows visitors to find things, yet eliminates a lot of content from search engines.
Consolidate coupons onto fewer pages, keeping them as tightly grouped as possible for commonality of topical focus related to the most important or most relevant search phrases. This is very challenging to execute and requires great care. It also means that some searched phrases may become lost. However it's honestly the most likely scenario short of uniquely written significant depth of content on every page. Another benefit to this method is when one coupon expires, the entire page doesn't become dead/useless and doesn't need to be 301 Redirected, which on a coupon site would otherwise become a bigger problem over time (too many 301 redirects over too long a period).

intSchools

I would use the rel=canonical tag for these kind of duplicate content issues. Rather than having me explain I think its best to link you to some great content on the topic:

Get started:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

_Advanced: _

_http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks_

Gives you some other options:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this helps!