Duplicate Content?
-
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.)
But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it?
Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
-
Cool. No worries
StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.
If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect
You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Yes, on Google webmaster...sorry. And it's apache.
thank u!
-
Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.
That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.
Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!
Mike
-
HI Mike,
Thank you. To change all the titles is a huge task, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think I'll put them in a folder and mark the page link to that folder with a nofollow. As to the canoncalization of the two names, I have marked one of them as the top one in Google Analytics. But I have a much greater problem than that. I have several domain names that are on the same server and that all point to the one domain (same files and folders). I have been attempting to get my server techs to do a 301 redirect so that only http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com displays in a browser. However, every time they attempt to do it, part or all of my site stops working correctly.
-
You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.
I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com
The issue with this, that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.
As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.
Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results. The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.
If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.
That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.
The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!
I hope that helps.
Mike
-
thank u. I'm gonna do that!
-
Hi Mike,
That was fast. I copied some of the report from Seomoz "Crawled Diagnostics." Some do have the same titles, which was an edition after many years. The early newsletters I didn't even title, so they have a "default title" of the url.
I happened on SEOmoz, because I am trying to figure out why after so many years of having been on the first or second page of Google search results, we are lucky to show up on page 10 or deeper, if at all.
So I'm trying out SEOmoz to see if this will help us get back on top!
|
The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr10.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr08.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr09.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Feb06.html
-
Hi Sarah,
If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.
What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?
Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.
The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.
If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.
... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.
Hope this helps,
Mike
-
The best way to go is to put all your newsletters in on folder and and disallow the folder in your robot.txt.
rel nofollow & robot.txt are only read by google bot, your visitors won't be affected and will be able to navigate & search the archives without problem.
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
-
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Gallery Causing Duplicate Content Issues
Hi! I have a gallery on my website. When you click to view the next image it goes to a new page but the content is exactly the same as the first page. This is flagging up a duplicate content issue. What is the best way to fix this? Add a canonical tag to page 2,3,4 or add a noindex tag? I have found a lot of conflicting answers. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | emma19860 -
Sites for English speaking countries: Duplicate Content - What to do?
HI, We are planning to launch sites specific to target market (geographic location) but the products and services are similar in all those markets as we sell software.So here's the scenario: Our target markets are all English speaking countries i.e. Britain, USA and India We don't have the option of using ccTLD like .co.uk, co.in etc. How should we handle the content? Because product, its features, industries it caters to and our services are common irrespective of market. Whether we go with sub-directory or sub-domain, the content will be in English. So how should we craft the content? Is writing the unique content for the same product thrice the only option? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Duplicate Content in Dot Net Nuke
Our site is built on Dot Net Nuke. SEOmoz shows a very large amount of duplicate content because at the beginning each page got an extension in the following format: www.domain.com/tabid/110/Default.aspx The site additionally exists without the tabid... part. Our web developer says an easy fix with a canonical tag or 301 redirect is not possible. Does anyone have DNN experience and can point us in the right direction? Thanks, Ricarda
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
Duplicate content due to credit card testing
I recently launched a site - http://www.footballtriviaquestions.co.uk and the site uses Paypal. In order to test the PayPal functionality I set up a zapto.org domain via a permanent IP service that points directly to the computer I've written the website on. It appears that Google has now indexed the zapto.org website. Will this cause problems to my main website, as the zapto.org website will pretty much contain content that is an exact duplicate of what is held on the main website. I've looked in Google webmaster tools for the main website and it doesn't mention any duplicate content, but I'm currently not in the top 50 ranking for "football trivia questions' on Google despite SEOMoz ranking my home page with an A rating. The page does rank at position 16 in Yahoo and Bing. This seems odd to me, although I do have very few back links pointing to my site. If the duplicate content is likely to be causing me problems what would be the best way to knock the zapto.org results out of Google
Technical SEO | | ipr1010 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0