Duplicate content resulting from js redirect?
-
I recently created a cname (e.g. m.client-site .com) and added some js (supplied by
mobile site vendor to the head which is designed to detect if the user agent is a mobi device or not. This is part of the js:
var CurrentUrl = location.href var noredirect = document.location.search; if (noredirect.indexOf("no_redirect=true") < 0){ if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Android.*Mobile|webOS|Window
Now... Webmaster Tools is indicating 2 url versions for each page on the site - for example:
1.) /content-page.html
2.) /content-page.html?no_redirect=true
and resulting in duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.
I am not quite adept enough at either js or htaccess to really grasp what's going on here... so an explanation of why this is occurring and how to deal with it would be appreciated!
-
You're welcome
-
That makes perfect sense. I think I will try instructing webmaster to ignore the variable as you initially suggested. It's the quickest approach
Thank you very much for your time and wisdom - much appreciated!
Dino
-
I'm not great with JS myself - I'm lucky enough to employ people to do that for me! However, here is what the script is doing:
- First check whether "no_direct=true" has been set - presumably to allow users to override the mobile version and view the full desktop version if they choose
- If that hasn't been set then look to see if they are using iPhone/iPod/Blackberry/Android browsers
- Presumably the next line is then redirecting.
That seems fairly logical - no real problem there. However the mobile version is getting picked up and indexed somewhere.
Because you want users to have access to that "duplicate" version, but don't want the search engines too you don't really want to either prevent this URL from existing or override it with .htaccess . It would be smarter to pick a method that targets the search engines, such as:
- Stop them crawling it (through webmaster tools or robots.txt)
- Add a no-index tag to it
- Canonical it back to the main content
-
Hi Mat,
Thanks for the response!
I am really trying to understand what is occurring here and how to remedy via js or htaccess.
Can you please provide further insight?
Thank you.
-
The easiest way to fix this is to tell google to ignore the URL variable no_redirect . You can do this in webmaster tools under Configuration > URL parameters. find where no_redirect is listed, click edit and set it to "used for tracking".
Remember to do similar for bing.
You could also block these in robots.txt
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 Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
What is best practise for markup in a nav bar, avoid duplicate content.
I'm wondering what's best practise for markup in the nav bar. So if we have <nav> Can we have headers in there, does it help? If we do, would a H1 confuse google as to wether that is the H1 of importance of the one in thein the </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup0 -
Manage category pages and duplicate content issues
Hi everybody, I am now auditing this website www.disfracessimon.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
this website has some issues with canonicals and other things. But right now I have found something that I would like to know your opinion. When I was checking parts of the content in google to find duplicate content issues I found this: I google I searched: "Chaleco de streck decorado con botones" and found First result: "Hombre trovador" is the one I was checking -> Correct
The following results are category pages where the product is listed in. I was wondering if this could cause any problem related with duplicated content. Should I no index category pages or should I keep it?
The first result in google was the product page. And category pages I think are good for link juice transfer and to capture some searchs from Google. Any advice? Thank you0 -
Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not. Here are some additional sample links: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Careerbags
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggallini All of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?0 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Last Panda: removed a lot of duplicated content but no still luck!
Hello here, my website virtualsheetmusic.com has been hit several times by Panda since its inception back in February 2011, and so we decided 5 weeks ago to get rid of about 60,000 thin, almost duplicate pages via noindex metatags and canonical (we have no removed physically those pages from our site giving back a 404 because our users may search for those items on our own website), so we expected this last Panda update (#25) to give us some traffic back... instead we lost an additional 10-12% traffic from Google and now it looks even really badly targeted. Let me say how disappointing is this after so much work! I must admit that we still have many pages that may look thin and duplicate content and we are considering to remove those too (but those are actually giving us sales from Google!), but I expected from this last Panda to recover a little bit and improve our positions on the index. Instead nothing, we have been hit again, and badly. I am pretty desperate, and I am afraid to have lost the compass here. I am particularly afraid that the removal of over 60,000 pages via noindex metatags from the index, for some unknown reason, has been more damaging than beneficial. What do you think? Is it just a matter of time? Am I on the right path? Do we need to wait just a little bit more and keep removing (via noindex metatags) duplicate content and improve all the rest as usual? Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0