Need help with some duplicate content.
-
I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was.
It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this:
http://noahsdad.com/resources/
http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/
http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/
I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category.
What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed."
There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories.
Any ideas what I should do?
Thanks.
-
I didn't mention "prev" and "next" as they are already implemented in the head tag, would you add them directly to the links as well? Also, I think Google is the only search engine that supports them at the moment.
-
Gianluca is correct. prev next would work here, but i thought this would be too confusing, i did not know there were plugins that can do this for you. also, this would make page one rank for all the content, this may confuse users when they dont find the content the searched for on that page. so technicaly it would work, but foor the user i dont know if it is the right solutions, this works best for one article over many pages.
-
The correct answer to your kind of issue, which is related to psgination, is this one: Use the rel="prev" rel="next" tags. These are the tags Google suggest to use in order to specify that a set of pages are paginated, hence it will just consider the first one. Check these links: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html http://www.seomoz.org/q/need-help-with-some-duplicate-content There are several plugins for Wordpress about this solution.
-
Yes, I have about 60 404's and 403's I'm trying to correct...
Thanks for the feedback by the way.
-
I've never used Wordpress but does this help?
http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/avoid-duplicate-meta-descriptions-in-pages-2-and-higher-of-the-wordpress-loop/It's strange how it's possible to add canonical page numbers, but not add the same thing to the title tag, I think.
-
You look like you're doing a good job, you even have unique text content for each video on the pages, so I can't see why they're flagging as duplicates. Is this in the SEOmoz software? That takes into account the whole structure of the page rather than just the content. Like Alan says, add the page number to the title tag if possible, though I'd add it at the beginning of the tag - it just helps show the search engines that page 1 is the most important.
P.S. this is still a good article a couple of years later: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience
-
Thats why i said if it is difficult then i would not worry.
i would not no-index them,
if you had unique titles, you may rank a bit better, you ae not going to get punished for it if they dont. but if you no-index, you are punishing yourself.
not only do no-indexed pages not appear in search results, but any link pointing to them is wasting link juice.
-
I'm not sure how you would give the author pages different titles on a Wordpress powered site...
Should I check some of the no index settings within the plugin?
-
OK, then yes try to give them unique page titles, even add page 2 on the end, if this is difficault to do then i would not worry too much about it.
-
On my reports they show up as duplicate page titiles....
-
Maybe i am not understading you, but these pages dont apear to be duplicates top me
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
-
Lost 75% of my traffic on Oct 25, help appreciated
So I've been running coolquotescollection.com since 1997 (!) as a hobby project. I lost about 75% of my organic search traffic on the 25th of October, literally overnight. I've been doing a lot of research but I still don't know why I was penalized. Image attached. I naturally thought this was because of Penguin (Oct 17, my drop was Oct 25). However, after checking backlinks I only discovered 11 domains with about 100-400 links each, the major ones were forum signatures and blog sidebars, 6 domains were spam sites / directories. They almost exclusively used the same anchor text (domain name or similar), so this doesn't seem like a black hat attack. Some of the directories used keywords in their urls however (like "funny quotes").
Algorithm Updates | | Sire
1. Is this really enough for such a heavy penalty?
I added these domains to be disavowed today, I'm aware this might take weeks or months to change. I've automated so that pictures gets uploaded to my Facebook page with a link to my page. This started in early 2014.
2. Can Facebook links be considered link spam?
They don't even show up in webmaster tools.
Example: https://www.facebook.com/CoolQuotesCollection/photos/a.510328825689624.1073741825.326096120779563/615403025182203/?type=1&theater I analyzed keywords and the major ones dropped between 2 and 6 positions. Notable exception: I seem to still rank nr 1 for "cool movie quotes" even though page is not optimized for that keyword. Moz warned about over 5000 pages with duplicate content. It was a single page that used a querystring url parameter I have excluded in webmaster tools. I have now entered a canonical link on these pages. Example:
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-url-example...
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-another-url.......
3. Could the Google algo penalize this even though I have excluded the "url" parameter? I have a lot of internal links in the page navigation. Can this cause problems? See the absolute bottom of this page where I have 94 links for example: http://coolquotescollection.com/laughs
4. Could a lot of internal links (navigation to page numbers) be the problem? Some more facts: Site is http://coolquotescollection.com/ Domain is 14 years old. The web site launched in Sep 1997, a year before Google! (Not relevant but you might understand why this is important to me). I haven't done any SEO work for at least 12 months, probably closer to two years. The only SEO work I've done is to optimize the pages, no link building at all, no black hat stuff. I'm automatically building a sitemap that contains all pages, see here: http://coolquotescollection.com/robots.txt I've used webmaster tools for years, haven't gotten any warnings. I checked backlinks there, also here from moz and ahrefs. I'm annoyed that a quality content site can be penalized so hard (75% drop) when there are no, or just smaller issues. I'm just lucky this is not my business site, if so I would have gone out of business. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated! z3yFNdb.png Cci7vfI.png0 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Google webmaster tool content keywords Top URLs
GWT->Optimization->Content Keywords section... If we click on the keyword it will further shows the variants and Top URLs containing those variants. My problem is none of the important pages like product details pages, homepage or category pages are present in that Top URLs list. All the news, guides section url's are listed in the Top URLs section for most important keyword that is also present in my domain name. How to make google realize the important pages for the important keyword?
Algorithm Updates | | BipSum0 -
Duplicate content advice
Im looking for a little advice. My website has always done rather well on the search engines, although it have never ranked well for my top keywords on my main site as they are very competitive, although it does rank for lots of obscure keywords that contain my top keywords or my top keywords + City/Ares. We have over 1,600 pages on the main site most with unique content on, which is what i attribute to why we rank well for the obscure keywords. Content also changes daily on several main pages. Recently we have made some updates to the usability of the site which our users are liking (page views are up by 100%, time on site us up, bounce rate is down by 50%!).
Algorithm Updates | | jonny512379
However it looks like Google did not like the updates....... and has started to send us less visitors (down by around 25%, across several sites. the sites i did not update (kind of like my control) have been unaffected!). We went through the Panda and Penguin updates unaffected (visitors actually went up!). So i have joined SEOmoz (and loving it, just like McDonald's). I am now going trough all my sites and making changes to hopefully improve things above and beyond what we used to do. However out of the 1,600 pages, 386 are being flagged as duplicate content (within my own site), most/half of this is down to; We are a directory type site split into all major cities in the UK.
Cities that don't have listings on, or cities that have the same/similar listing on (as our users provide services to several cities) are been flagged as duplicate content.
Some of the duplicate content is due to dynamic pages that i can correct (i.e out.php?***** i will noindex these pages if thats the best way?) What i would like to know is; Is this duplicate content flags going to be causing me problems, keeping in mind that the Penguin update did not seem to affect us. If so what advise would people here offer?
I can not redirect the pages, as they are for individual cities (and are also dynamic = only one physical page but using URL rewriting). I can however remove links to cities with no listings, although Google already have these pages listed, so i doubt removing the links from my pages and site map will affect this. I am not sure if i can post my URL's here as the sites do have adult content on, although is not porn (we are an Escort Guide/Directory, with some partial nudity). I would love to hear opinions0 -
Duplicate videos
We have multiple screen cast videos being made that are the same all except for city names being switched out. Does anyone know if this might be frowned upon by Google in the same way that duplicate content is?
Algorithm Updates | | Stevej240 -
Can you help with a few high-level mobile SEO questions?
Rolling out a mobile site for a client and I'm not positive about the following: Do these mobile pages need to be optimized with the same / similar page titles? If we have a product page on the regular site with an optimized title like "Men's Sweaters, Shirts and Ties - Company XYZ", should the mobile version's page have the same title? What if the dev team simply named it "Company XYZ Clothes" and missed the targeted keywords? Does it matter? Along the lines of question 1, isn't there truly just one index and your regular desktop browser version will be used for all ranking factors on both desktop and mobile SERPs? If that regular page indeed ranks well for "men's sweaters" and that term is searched on a mobile device, the visitor will be detected and served up the mobile page version, regardless of its meta tags and authority (say it's on a subdomain, m.example/.com/mens-department/ ), correct? Are meta descriptions necessary for the mobile version? Will the GoogleBot Mobile recognize them or will just the regular version work? Looks like mobile meta descriptions have about 30 less characters. Thanks in advance. Any advice is appreciated. AK
Algorithm Updates | | akim260 -
Why is a website with lower content interest reaching higher in google
there is a website that i am competing with <cite>www.gastricbandhypnotherapy.net for the term gastric band hypnotherapy and for some reason it is now ranching higher than me.</cite> I have been number one in google with http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy for the term Gastric Band Hypnotherapy but for some reason in the past few days it has ranked number one and pushed me down to number three. i do not understand it as there is not much relevant content to gastric band hypnotherapy and also it does not have many links pointing into it can you please help with this question
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Regarding google panda: would it be wise to use automatic generated content when there is no content.
Hi guys, i am currently creating a local business directory and was deciding when we first start there will be a lot of business listings without a business decription until the owner of that business come to submit a description. so when if a business listing have no business description would it be better to have an automatic generated business description like this:
Algorithm Updates | | usaccess608
www.startlocal.com.au/retail/books/tas_hobartandsouth/Scene_Magazine_2797040.html the automated genrated description for this listing on that page is:
Scene Magazine is a business that is based in Kingston, 7050, TAS: Hobart And South. Scene Magazine is listed in 2 categories including: Magazines and Periodicals Shops and Book Stores and Shops. Within the Magazines and Periodicals Shops category there are 5 businesses within 25 km of Scene Magazine. Some of those businesses included within the radius of 25 km are Island Magazine, Artemis Publishing Consultants and Bride Tasmania Magazine. would google panda affect this or not and would it be wise to use this auto content when there is no description for a business?0