Are blank pages considered duplicate conent?
Can SEO experts tell me if blank pages are considered duplicate content? In my point of view, it is not considered duplicate. What should I write because I am unable to lead this question. Thank you, I am waiting for your answers very eagerly.
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Jan 7, 2015
AFAIK blank pages are not considered as duplicate content.
However it begs the question: why do you have multiple blanks pages accessible on your site?
Jan 10, 2015
Good question Gee... Dinesh, can control crawler accessibility with his robots.txt file and use a placeholder for his web page while building his site and implementing content on a sub domain (lab1.dinesh.com). Once he finishes the site, it can then be moved to the primary domain for general access.
Jan 7, 2015
Duplicate content is most often the result of duplicate page titles. So if you have multiple blank pages with the same title, these could be considered duplicates.
For our own sites we often have blank pages, or pages under constructions, or pages with templates content. Because these pages are not truly a meaningful part of our site structure, we make sure they do not get indexed or followed by search engines, and we also make sure to exclude them from our site maps.
Fortunately this is an easy fix if you are running a CMS based site like Wordpress, the best option is to install the leading SEO plugin from Yoast, called "Wordpress SEO by Yoast", and this adds a settings segment to each post or page where you can control this.
If you are building a non CMS based site and need to manually manipulate this, you can do so with a meta tag in the header section of the page you are building: Read more about how to do this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
Jan 8, 2015
Gee's question is the right one. If you're concerned with blank pages representing duplicate content, it's safe to assume the catalyst for your concern is the negative impact said pages would have on your Search performance. Well, regardless of whether or not your multiple blank pages are being tallied as duplicate content, they're still hurting you.
Think Panda.
Why on earth would you want multiple blank pages on your site? Or, perhaps a better way of asking, what value to a user do multiple blank pages on your site serve?
As Juergen indicated, I would protect your Domain Authority and prevent those blank pages from being indexed until they are ready to provide value.
Jan 8, 2015
Theoretically, you can't duplicate content without having any content. Duplicate content can hinder your SERP rankings -- but if you have no content, you very likely have no rankings, so worrying about duplicate content is a moot point.
Jan 8, 2015
In my experience, it just rumor that blank pages are considered duplicate content. What I look at first when encountering blank pages on a clients site, is how would the my clients potential customer see it. Lazy, uninformed, disorganized, disappointed?
There are many reasons for blank pages; non existant review/testimonial linked pages from products, products without content entered, pages from websites in development, category pages without content, and more.
There are all kinds of plugins if using a CMS to solve these problems, but the easiest way is to temporarily use the no index/no archive meta tag for each of those pages. You could redirect as well to pages with content.
What I keep in mind as an SEO, is that if your potential client traffic came from a search engine, most likely, he entered a keyword. IF a page is truly a blank page, most likely won't have a keyword, so may not end up in search results anyhow, but if by some chance it did because your meta description has been prefilled, and the potential customer choose your site over other based on that description, you have just wasted their time, and you have let them down, by not following through on your promise of information. Don't count on them clicking more links on your website, you have 4 seconds to get their attention. Don't blow it :).
Jan 8, 2015
No. It is not considered duplicate content. Furthermore the standards for duplicate content are not as tight as you might think. We have seen as much as 50 pages of "duplicate content" before a penalty is assessed though I would advise testing the limits. What I would offer as a general rule is a minimum of 500 words on a page and a keyword density no great or less than 2-3%, Meaning for the 500 word article, empirical page or blog- you must use your key phrase no more or less than 10-15 times and do not put more than 2 keywords on a page or in the tagging areas- you'll be spinning your wheels. If you have any questions you would like to go over- my office is open to all mosaichub members direct and I am the head of the company so feel free to ask away without fear of any sales pitch. Hope this helps and look us up when you are ready.
Jan 10, 2015
Absolutely not. Furthermore, as you add content to those pages, you can use your robots.txt file to prevent pages that are under construction from being crawled by the search engines.
Jan 15, 2015
An easy way to prevent the pages from being crawled is to move them all into a subfolder then deny robot access using your robots.txt file until you have the content to move onto the live site. As for duplication issues the pages are blank and doesn't matter one way or the other. In other words the only way that these pages would rank well to begin with is if the keyword competition is so small and the search activity as well. hope that helps
Thank you so much Gee, Some times the situation comes like my website is still all pages blank. Thanks