12 Kinds of Duplicate Content in Local SEO: Which Ones Are Trouble? by Phil Rozek

[Linda Buquet]

Phil starts the New Year off right with another good local search post.

12 Kinds of Duplicate Content in Local SEO: Which Ones Are Trouble?

There are two intertwined myths about duplicate content:

1: That Google is on the warpath against it, penalizing sites left and right.

2: That duplicate content is a thing – one specific problem.

Neither is true, because of one fact: there are many different types of duplicate content. (Google says so, too.)

That’s even more true in local SEO – because to rank well in local search you’re not just dealing with your site, but also with a bunch of listings.

Some types of duplicate content hurt your rankings, whereas many are just a mild drag or are harmless...

I can think of at least 12 types of duplicate content. Pay attention to the types that (at least in my experience) might hurt you, and don’t spend time worrying about the harmless ones.

Head over to read the rest...


You guys know I have a much different opinion on #2 the practitioner dupes part.

I deal with listings all day long that suffer ranking problems and being disconnected from the pack due to practitioner dupes. Once I explain how my strategy of how to minimize the practitioner listing the practice listing pops right back up in the pack. Just did it again with a tough last week at the LocalU forum. A week after he made all my recommended changes his client was back at the top of the pack.

All the consultants I train tell me it works and Google even put their stamp of approval on the strategy.

Now I will say that post-Pigeon are not quite as much of a problem. Before Dr dupes would always knock you out of the pack. Now they do sometimes and sometimes they don’t. BUT if they do cause a problem, I’ve never seen a case where “minimizing” doesn’t fix it in a week or two.


What do you guys think??? Any other types of dupe content to discuss or did Phil cover them all?

 

[JoyHawkins]

We had a weird situation once where a doctor listing for a dentist was marked closed was causing issues for the practice listing. The doctor was no longer at the practice so it should have been marked closed.

The only issue is you cannot edit a listing that is marked closed without reopening it. I wanted to test it out and got one of the MapMaker RERs to open it for me just as an experiment. The listing instantly moved right up to the top of the pack. We obviously had to close it after again but it was a somewhat scary realization that a doctor leaving a practice could cause ranking issues for the practice itself.

 

[Linda Buquet]

So are you saying you opened it to minimize it? Then the practice popped right up.
Then you closed it again and the practice kept ranking because the closed listing was minimized?

 

[JoyHawkins]

In this case I opened it just to see what would happen. But ran into another case where I was trying to minimize a listing and you cannot edit it when it's closed unless you reopen first.

For this case, the practice listing wasn't ranking (they were before pigeon), when we reopened the practitioner listing it sprang up to A, when we closed it again, we were back to square one (nothing ranking).

 

[HurricaneK8]

(Originally posted to the article)
Awesome article Phil!

We ran a test where we took about 4 pages that were fairly close/borderline duplicate in content and redirected them to the highest ranking page about that topic (it was a dentist website). It didn?t happen overnight, but the phrase we were targeting did move from page 3 to page 1! We?ll have to test this on some more clients to say that?s for sure what Google was disliking about the website, but it looks like on-site near duplicate content was hurting.

Another thing to be aware of is there?s a certain SEO service out there run by an internet/phone company (that probably don?t know much about SEO) where they give the client a ?FREE? website if they sign up for 4 months at a low price, and then if they cancel they get to keep the website. The company makes a mirror site to work on. We?ve had clients come back and didn?t notice the mirror site for a few months and it definitly hurt rankings! Once it was redirected they shot back up to previous rankings though

 

[Phil Rozek]

Thanks, Linda - and great discussion, everybody!

(Linda, I replied to your very good comment on my post )

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Phil!