Duplicate content warnings
-
I have a ton of duplicate content warnings for my site poker-coaching.net, but I can't see where there are duplicate URLs. I cannot find any function where I could check the original URL vs a list of other URLs where the duplicate content is?
-
thanks for the help. I am trying to cover all bases here. Duplicate content was one concern, the other one is too high link density and bad incoming links.
I have downloaded a full backlinks report now using Majestic SEO (OSE only shows incoming links from 74 domains...).
I think I may have found the problem. I used to have a forum on that domain years ago which was hacked and used for a lot of spammy outgoing links for stuff like Cialis, Viagra etc.. Those guys also linked from other sites to my forum pages. Example:| from: http://www.grupoibira.com/foro/viewto...
| Anchor: buy flagyl in lincolnu... | 3 | to: http://www.poker-coaching.net/phpbb3/...
|
When I closed the forum and deleted the forum plugin, I redirected all forum pages to my main page which, under the circumstances was a bad mistake I guess. Because with the redirect, all those spammy links now end up pointing to my main page, right? So first, I have removed that redirect now.
But the problem remains that I still have plenty of links from spam sites pointing to URLs of my domain that do not exist any more.
Is there anything else I can do to remove those links or have Google remove/disregard them, or do you think a reconsideration request explaining the situation would help? -
Honestly, with only 235 indexed pages, it's pretty doubtful that duplicate content caused you an outright penalty (such as being hit with Panda). Given your industry, it's much more likely you've got a link-based penalty or link quality issue in play.
You do have a chunk of spammy blog comments and some low-value article marketing, for example:
http://undertheinfluence.nationaljournal.com/2010/02/summit-attendees.php
A bit of that is fine (and happens in your industry a lot), but when it's too much of your link profile too soon, you could be getting yourself into penalty territory.
-
Hey There,
Just to clarify, to see the source of those errors, you’ll need to download your Full Crawl Diagnostics CSV and open it up in something like Excel. In the first column, perform a search for the URL of the page you are looking for. When you find the correct row, look in the last column labeled referrer. This tells you the referral URL of the page where our crawlers first found the target URL. You can then visit this URL to find the source of your errors. If you need more help with that, check out this link: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20895376-crawl-diagnostics-csv
Hope that helps! I will look at the issue on the back end to see if they are actually duplicate content.
Have a great day,
Nick
-
Thanks for looking into this. Actually I checked the whole site by doing a batch search on Copyscape and there were only minor duplicate content issues. I resolved those by editing the content parts in question (on February 24th 2012).
Since I am desperately searching for the reasons why this site was penalized (and it def is...), it would be great to know why your duplicate content checker finds errors. Could only be related to multiple versions of one page on different URLs. I do have all http://mysitedotcom redirected to www.mysitedotcom, and the trailing slash/notrailingslash URL problem was also resolved by a redirect long ago, so I do not know where the problem lies.
Thanks for the help! -
I think our system has roughly a 90-95% threshold for duplicate content. The pages I'm seeing in your campaign don't look that high, so something is up - I'm checking with support.
For now, use the "Duplicate Page Title" section - that'll tend to give you exact duplicates. The duplicate content detection also covers thin content and near duplicates.
-
Yes that is what I first thought too. If only it were that easy.
But when I do, I see a couple of URLs that definitely do not have any duplicate content . Could it be that the dupe content check considers text in sitewide modules (like the modules "Poker News" and "Tips for ...." in www.poker-coaching.net) as duplicate content, because they appear on all pages?
This way, the duplicate content finding function is totally worthless. -
If you drill down into your campaign report into 'Crawl Diagnostics' you will see a dropdown menu that's named "Show". Select 'Duplicate Page Content'... you will see a graph with a table below it. To the right of the URL you will see a column named "Other URL's". The numbers in that column are live links to a page with the list of URL's with duplicate content. At least that is how it is displayed in my campaigns.
-
You will find this information at google webmaster tools and at seomoz campaing. There you will the information you need.
One easy way to avoid this is to include the rel canonical metag. You need to include in every page (pages you want to be the official one) inside the head tag the follow:
where ww.example.com/index.html is your page adress. Good luck!
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
-
Tracking links and duplicate content
Hi all, I have a bit of a conundrum for you all pertaining to a tracking link issue I have run into on a clients site. They currently have over duplicate content. Currently, they have over 15,000 pages being crawled (using Screaming Frog) but only 7,000+ are legitimate pages in the sense of they are not duplicates of themselves. The client is using Omniture instead of Google Analytics and using an advanced tracking system on their site for internal and external links (ictids and ectids) in the URL parameters. This is creating thousands of duplicated pages being crawled by Google (as seen on their Search Console and on Screaming Frog). They also are in the middle of moving over from http to https and have thousands of pages currently set up for both, again, creating a duplicate content issue. What I have suggested for the tracking links is setting up a URL parameter in Search Console for these tracking links. I've also suggested they canonical all tracking links to point to the clean page so the pages that have already been indexed point to the correct clean url. Does this seam like the appropriate strategy? Additionally, I've told them before they submit a new sitemap to Google, they need to switch their website over to https to avoid worsening their duplicate content issue. They have not submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console since March 2015. Thank you for any help you can offer!
Reporting & Analytics | | Rydch410 -
Strange Traffic / Viewed content in Analytics
Hi Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views) How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ? Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ? Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ? All Best Dan ps - also many above average home page views
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Large content snippets showing up as keywords?
I've started to notice something very strange: the search keywords report in analytics show a bunch of instances where a person copied large snippets of our site content and then pasted it into the search box. Half these searches are coming from the US and half from...India. I'm worried that this may be the sign of a competitor attempting to perform negative SEO on our site (though admittedly I don't know how). Anyone seen anything like this? Advice? Thanks!!
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
How do I fix apparent duplicates
I'm auditing a site and would appreciate your help with possible explanations and solutions as to why Google Analytics in the Content Drilldown page is showing what appears to be duplicate pages. (Refer image) I'm wondering if I have got my head around the rel=canonical tag because the page I'd consider a duplicate "page/" has a Canonical tag pointing to "~/page.html" This is the tag from the page Locations/ rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/Locations.html" /> so am unsure why both versions of the page are generating views. Shouldn't the Canonical tag work like a 301 redirect? I'm unsure how the pages using the path page/ are generating so many views because I have not been able to find them and they are not indexed by Google. Unfortunately the site is built using a Propriety CMS I'm not familiar with. exK4EqrU25
Reporting & Analytics | | NicDale0 -
Why seomoz shows me "missing meta discription" on this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php ? Should I edit? how?? IIs it posible??
Good day to all! I am very confuse about results on seomoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary, especially with 6 Crawl Warnings Found. It says title too short: http://villasdiani.com/category/mombasa/, http://villasdiani.com/category/watamu/ , http://villasdiani.com/sitemap/ why would Google punish me for this??? why should I make longer title for sitemap? or Watamu? It is the name of the place - Watamu or Mombasa. It is very confusing for me. I have very big mess with the website and it is not ranking:-( what I have done:-( and is it possible to meta description for this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php how?? I even do not know where is it.
Reporting & Analytics | | VillasDiani0 -
Time until duplicate penalty is lifted?
Hello, I recently discovered that half of the pages on my site, about 3,500 were not being indexed or were indexing very very slow and with a heavy weight on them. I discovered the problem in the "HTML Suggestions" within Google's Webmaster Tools. An example of my main issue. All 3 of these URL were showing 200 Status OK in Google. www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time/ www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time I added some code to the .htaccess in order to remove the trailing slashes across the board. I also properly set up my 404 redirects, which were not properly set up by my developer (when the site "relaunched" 6 months ago 😞 ) I then added the Canonical link rel tags on the site posts/entries. I'm hoping I followed all the correct steps in fixing the issue and now, I guess, I just have to wait until the penalty gets lifted? I'm also not %100 certain that I have been penalized. I'm just assuming based on the SERP ceiling I feel and the super slow or lack of indexing my content. Any insight, help or comments would be super helpful. Thank you. Jesse
Reporting & Analytics | | getrightmusic0 -
Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports
Hi Friends, This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help. I just don't trust the analytics data at this point. I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website. These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them. For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations. My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation. If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them. I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...) Thanks. URL www.enf.org/camp www.enf.org/camp/ www.enf.org/foundation www.enf.org/foundation/ www.enf.org/Garden www.enf.org/garden www.enf.org/Hante_Adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures/ www.enf.org/oases www.enf.org/oases/ www.enf.org/outdoor_academy www.enf.org/outdoor_academy/
Reporting & Analytics | | DMoff0 -
Sub-category considered duplicate content?
Hello, My craw diagnostics from the PRO account is telling me that the following two links have duplicate content and duplicate title tag: http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases (New Blu-ray Releases) http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases/action-adventure (New Action & Adventure Releases | Blu-ray) I am really new to the SEO world so I am stuck trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. My question is how should I fix this issue. I guess I can put canonical tag on all sub-categories but I was worried that search engines would not craw the sub-categories and index potentially valuable pages. Thanks for all the help.
Reporting & Analytics | | hirono0