Duplicate content – The same text on multiple pages – The SEO Clinic

The same text on multiple pages is called Duplicate Content in SEO. That’s the issue that comes up in today’s SEO Clinic with a site that presents information based on municipalities — and in that situation, duplicate content problems are very common.

In this week’s SEO Clinic, we take a look at veterinarkartan.se and how duplicate content creates problems for it. The idea behind the site is that users can find veterinarians nearby, with the site showing veterinary clinics based on municipality. In addition, there’s a blog that performs relatively well in the search results, while the municipality pages don’t rank particularly well.

The most likely reason the municipality pages don’t rank is that these pages lack unique text. In some municipalities, such as Stockholm, there is some text, but it’s not entirely unique. In others, the text is a kind of boilerplate that appears on every municipality page, just with the name swapped out. This has led Google to conclude that these pages shouldn’t appear in the search results.

The solution

Every municipality needs unique text. The content on the municipality pages needs to be rewritten so that each page has its own unique text. You don’t have to rewrite them all at once — you could start with prioritized pages, such as those that already generate traffic or where there are multiple clinics.

Extra tip – a geographically organized tag system

There’s a kind of “tag system” on the municipality pages that links to other municipalities. Today, these links are sorted alphabetically, more or less.

They would need to be sorted by geographical proximity to the page you’re on. The current situation means that municipalities like Ale, Alingsås, Älmhult, Älvdalen, Alvesta, and Älvkarleby are prioritized above all others on the site, since they get links from every other page. This is also questionable from a user perspective, since people are more likely to want to see neighboring municipalities when looking for a clinic.

Extra tip 2 – The homepage has too many links

The homepage currently contains a very large number of links, primarily because it links to all municipalities. That can be too much, and we have two suggestions for solutions:

1. Remove the municipalities that don’t currently have clinics on the site. While this might make the site feel a bit empty, it would solve part of the issue from Google’s perspective.
2. Another solution is to sort them by county and create an intermediate page. The municipalities could then be listed on a “county page.” If you want, you could highlight the largest municipalities next to the counties to continue channeling authority to the bigger ones.

More about duplicate content

Veterinarkartan is far from the only site that struggles with duplicate content. The problem can arise in many different ways, and we’ve written about it before.