Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content
-
I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website.
A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website. Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking?
My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation.
Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?
-
You can use the new HTML5 tags
<header>
<footer>
<aside>.
They work the same as a, but give more information to Google.- http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_header.asp (Header)
- http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_footer.asp (Footer)
- http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_aside.asp (Sidebar)
</aside>
</footer>
</header>
-
Google can easily identify navigational elements that appear on every page, and will ignore those for the purposes of identifying duplicate content. You don't need to be worried about your navigation being flagged as duplicate content, that's a standard feature of most websites.
That being said, you can be penalized for having lots of pages with little or no content (Panda). You'll want to make sure all the pages on your site provide some kind of actual value.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content issue with ?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=
Hello,
Technical SEO | | Dinsh007
Recently, I was checking how my site content is getting indexed in Google and from today I noticed 2 links indexed on google for the same article: This is the proper link - https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/ But why this URL was indexed, I don't know - https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims Could you please tell me how to solve this issue? Thank you1 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
How does Google view duplicate photo content?
Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening? I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
Duplicate Content Issue WWW and Non WWW
One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.
Technical SEO | | Michael4g1 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Duplicate content problem from an index.php file
Hi One of my sites is flagging a duplicate content problem which is affecting the search rankings. The duplicate problem is caused by http://www.mydomain.com/index.php which has a page rank of 26 How can I sort the duplicate content problem, as the main page should just be http://www.mydomain.com which has a page rank of 42 and is the stronger page with stronger links etc Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0