Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?

[lbohen]

Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html.

When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages.

Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?

[TomRayner]

Hi Larry

Couple of questions - is that the only URL for the OOP pages, or are there other versions of the page and/or URL that exist?

If there are multiple pages, then that is definitely duplicate content. However, that can quite easily be fixed. If you add this code to the head tag of all those OOP pages, it will prevent Google from indexing the pages (thus not seeing them as duplicate):

That way you can keep the page for the user but not have to worry about duplicate content.  I would do this anyway even if there is only one version of the page, as the page is thin on content as it is.

If you are displaying that image on other URLs that used to have products on them, but have gone OOP, then those multiple URLs and pages would be duplicate.  Again, if you add the above code into the head text, it removes the problem.  You could also 301 redirect the URL of the product page to the OOP page.  For example, if you had a page for a product called: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/examplerecord.html that is now OOP, you could put in a 301 redirect to the http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. page and it wouldn't be duplicate.  You can learn more about redirection here.

Hope this helps.

[lbohen]

We use only one URL for the OOP pages. It is 301 redirected from the each unique OOP title's page. Based on what you said, I am understanding that this is fine. Correct?

[jesse-landry]

yes larry that is fine. so long as it is a single URL with a single HTML file on it, there is no duplicate issues. If you want to clarify I would suggest (if you aren't an SEOmoz pro member) to use a sitemap generator to ensure it isn't crawling multiple pages... But if that page is only listed once (and from what you are saying here that should be the case) then you have no duplicate content issues.

It's just the same as linking to one page from every page on your website. A redirect doesn't work much differently (although it does drop a small amount of linkjuice.)

You might consider no-crawling that OOP page anyway if you're still concerned. Not sure why you would need that one indexed in the first place.

Good luck to you!

[AlanMosley]

Yes that is duplicate content, you should make these pages return a 404 instead. or leave the content in place with a sold out banner or something.

Something I don't like is your index.htm on your home page, people how link to you are likely to link to http://www.audiobooksonline.com/ you will then get a 301 redirect to http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html

this will leak link juice, as all 301's leak link juice just the same as a link does, 155 if we go by the original published Google algorithm. Also your internal pages link to http://www.audiobooksonline.com and are once again redirected to http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html

[jesse-landry]

I'm confused. When a book goes out of print, does the URL change to this long OOP html page? Or does that book's URL then redirect to this page? Or *(shudders) do you make the OOP page re-titled to whatever the OOP book's page was?

If it were me I'd do the first scenario here. It's essentially the same concept as a 404.