Duplicate content problem

[canadageorge]

Hi there,

I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content:

We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots?

The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great!

Thanks very much!

George

[MonicaOConnor]

Hi there,

If you have a lot of HTML coding on pages, with no content, your HTML coding is what is triggering the duplicate content. Because you have no content, the HTML is all the bots see and if it is really similar, there is nothing to tell them that there is anything unique on the pages.

[donford]

Hi George,

To the first issue. Have you considered using a REL=CANONICAL tag on this pages with thin to no content (point to them to the parent category). Barring that option you could also just put a NOINDEX / NOFOLLOW. No sense in removing the page just in case it has a few links out there.

For the 404 page, the main reason I would suspect Moz seeing this as duplicate content would be because of parameters on it. It would make more sense to have a universal 404 Page and let the server handle the error for you and redirect where appropriate. Moz site.. www.thisSite.com/catalog/ImGoingNoWhere.php

404 Page are usually pretty simple to setup content wise. Your second goal would be to remove all links on your site that would return a 404.

[MonicaOConnor]

I would only use the Canonical tag if you don't want these pages to rank for anything in particular. When you set the authoritative page, you are eliminating the ranking potential of the non authoritative pages. Is it possible to get user generated content for these pages? Like reviews?

[donford]

The alternative he suggested was to delete the page. Before I removed a page I would canonical it.You can always undo the Canonical once content becomes available.

[canadageorge]

Thanks Don.

The links are external. We do have a general 404 page, but for whatever reason, when he built this site, the developer guided those specific 404s to that news page.

Thanks again.