Duplicate Content

[MyClassicGarage]

Crawl Diagnostics is returning duplicate content/title tags for every product image on listing pages of my classified site because each image is on a separate url.

So this page, for example,

http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/

has, among other things, the same title tag as all this page,

http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/**media/151968**

which is one of many different images that are all child pages in the folder /media

In this particular case there are over 140 pages with the same title tag because there are over 140 images for this particular car. That is just one listing and there are over 1,000 listings (vehicles) and that number will grow.

Is this really a problem?  With limited resources, what real positive effect will making all these images have unique title tags really have from a SERP perspective?  Keep in mind this being user generated content, there is no way to descriptively update the title tags to something like <title>Bel Air Passenger Side Profile</title>.  That is not feasible.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jim,

What a car!

I don't think there is much point in making unique title tags for each of the images, if the layout stays the same you will still have duplicate content issues even if you change the titles.

What you really want to do is consolidate the content onto one page, and there are 2 ways that should hopefully be pretty painless to do, depending on your CMS:

1. Change your slideshow code so that the images are loaded without changing the url of the page.

2. Use the rel canonical tag so that all the /media/ urls have a rel canonical tag pointing back to the original Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/ page.

Either of those solutions should work in terms of avoiding duplicate content issues, I would be inclined to go with the first one myself if feasible.

Hope that helps!

[MyClassicGarage]

Thanks Lynn.  I've asked our Dev how painful/painless #1 is as this is a completely bespoke site running Ruby on Rails so no CMS.  Hopefully won't hurt too much.  Thanks again!

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Jim,

Is this really a problem? With limited resources, what real positive effect will making all these images have unique title tags really have from a SERP perspective?

Yes it will help, giving descriptions for your images can also help visually impaired people. I would name all my images, however if theres other content on these pages that are duplicate such as URL string I would recommend adding a canonical code, this will help you avoid duplicate content penalties.

This should help:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394