Handling Duplicate Content - Template to Content Word Ratio
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Andy Jackson of StomperNet did a very detailed video on duplicate content. It can be found in three parts, here, here, and here.
Let's discuss what he taught in his video.
Merchant sites primarily run into two problems. The first one is that the content is a perfect copy of manufacturer descriptions. This is one is easy to fix: create your own content for each listing. This will either cost you money or a lot of time, but if you want to rank well in the SERPs, that's the price.
The next problem is similarity of internal pages to one another. For example, one page is selling green widgets and another is selling yellow widgets. The only difference between those pages are the words "green" and "yellow" and pictures of the widgets. To search engines, those pages look almost identical, so they will drop them from their index.
This again must be fixed with original content. Though you must maintain feature descriptions on the page, you can add separate descriptions to each widget to differentiate it from other pages in the eyes of search engines.
Your website has:
Navigation menus.
Footers (stuff on the bottom).
Headers (stuff on the top, like the logo).
Right / left panels (or both).
Content section.
Those elements stay consistent throughout the website, except the content section. For example, If you navigate seochat.com, the navigation menu on the left will stay the same. The header on top with the SEO Chat logo will stay intact as well; so will the footer. The only thing that will change is the content, which is located in the middle.
We as users and webmasters treat this as normal. That's just the way things are on the web. Navigation, footers and headers stay the same, while content changes from page to page. This is the correct approach to websites, but that's not how search engines view and judge pages.
Search engine spiders can only see code. They don't see the sites as we do. For search engines, the navigation, footer and header look identical on different pages. They look like duplicate "content." For example, if the Google bot navigates SEO Chat from page to page, it will see completely duplicate header code, navigation code and footer code on all of its pages. The only difference Google bot will see is the difference in content.
This is what search engine spiders are programmed to detect - differences in content. Search engineers realize that duplication of the navigation, footer and header is part of web design and web standards, so they program robots to look at those duplications in code as normal, and extract original content from pages.
That's where the problem comes in with merchants. Imagine you're selling one red knife and one blue knife. Descriptions have few words, and the only difference between pages is the picture! To search engine spiders, pages look almost 100 percent identical, except for the picture!
But that's not the only problem. When differentiating pages we also have to keep in mind the content to template word ratio. You can calculate this ratio using seochat.com as example.
Open a Word document and copy SEO Chat's left side navigation, top header, and footer.
Use the word count feature to see how many words they contain.
I calculated 217, but you might have something a little different.
Knowing that the footer, header and navigation contain 217 words, you now know how much unique content you need for EACH product on your pages - 217 or more words. Each page on your site should contain exactly as many words (or more) as the navigation, footer and header to appear different to search engine spiders! [In fact, on SEO Chat, an article page typically contains between 300 and 500 words of original content. --Ed.]
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