Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
-
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain.
Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm.
There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case?
- use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site
2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk
In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best.
Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
-
It's a little tricky. While Andrea is right about Robots.txt - it's not great for removal once pages/domains are indexed, you can block the sub-domain with robots.txt and then request removal in Google Webmaster Tools (you need to create a separate account for the sub-domain itself). That's often the fastest way to remove something from the index, and if it has no search value, I might go that route. Just proceed with caution - it's a delicate procedure.
Doing 1-to-1 canonicalization or adding 301 redirects may be the next strongest signal (NOINDEX is a bit weaker, IMO). However, Google will have to re-crawl the sub-domain to do that, so you'll need to keep the paths open.
-
First, if the pages are already indexed then a robots.txt won't make them go away. A meta tag no index on the pages is the better solution. This allows search engines to "read" you page, see the no index tag and then work to remove the pages from index. A robots.txt doesn't necessarily accomplish the same result.
-
If you can do a 1-to-1 page canonicalization (each page on .co.uk is canonicaled to the equivalent page on the .com) then I would do that.
Otherwise, I would noindex the backup site.
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
-
Short description about our search results drop + forum moving to subdomain question.
Hello, here is our story. Our niche is mental health (psychology, psychotherapy e.t.c). Our portal has thousand of genuine articles, news section about mental health, researches, job findings for specialists, a specialized bookstore only with psychology books, the best forum in country, we thousands of active members and selfhelp topics etc. In our country (non english), our portal has been established in 2003. Since then, for more than 15 years, we were no 1 in our country, meaning that we had the best brand name, hundreds of external authors writing unique content for our portal and hundreds of no1 keywords in google search results. Actually, we had according to webmaster tools, more than 1.000 keywords, in 1 and 2 position. (we were ranking no1 in all the best keywords). Before 2 years, we purchased the best domain in our niche. I ll use the below example (of course, domains are not the real ones):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dodoni
We had: e-pizza.com and now we have: pizza.com
We did the appropriate redirects but from day one, we had around 20-30% drop in search engines. After 6 months -which is something that google officialy mentions, we lost all "credits from the old domain.. .and at that point, we had another 20-30% drop in search results. Further more, in any google core update, we were keep dropping. Especially in last May (coronovirus update), we had another huge drop. We do follow seo guides, we have a dedicated server, good load speed, well structured data, amp, a great presence in social media, with more than 130.000 followers, etc. According to our investigation, we came to one only conclusion: that our forum, kills our seo (of course, noone in our team can guarantee that this is the actual reason of the uge drop in may-in coronovirus google core update). We believe that the forum kills our seo, because it produces low quality posts by members. For example, psychopharmacology in a very active sections and we believe, google is very "sensitive" in these kind of posts and information. So here is the question: although the forum is very very active, with thousands of new topics and posts every month, we are thinking of moving it to a subdomain, from the subfolder that now is.
This will help our domain authority to increase from 38 that is stuck 2 years now, to larger scales. We believe that althougth this forum gave a great boost to the portal, in the past 10-15 years, it somehow makes a negative impact now. If I could give more spesific details, I d say this: in all seo tools we run, the best kewwords bringing visitors to us, arent anymore, psychology and psychotherapy and mental health and this kind of top-keywords, but are mostly the ones from the forum, like: I want to proceed with a suicide, I m taking efexor or xanax and they have side effects, why i gain wieght with the antidepressants I get etc. 1. Moving our forum to subdomain, will be some kind of pain, since it is a large community, with thousands of backlinks that we somehow must handle in a proper way, also with a mobile application, things that will have to change and probably have some kind of negative impact. Would that be according to your knowledge a correct move and our E-A-T will benefit for google, or since google will know that the subdomain is still part of the same website/portal, it will handle it somehow, the same way as it does now? I have read hundreds of articles about forum in subdomains or in subfolders, but none of them covers a case stydy like ours, since most articles are talking about new forums and what is the best way to handle them and where is the best place to create them (in subfolder of subdomain) when from scratch. Looking forward to your answers.0 -
Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!1 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
How would I know if Google is showing me as two separate sites?
I work for a company that is (for example) www.neat-stuff.com, most people just type in www.neatstuff.com. I think that we are being counted as a site twice. Any suggestions as to how to know for sure? If you want to know why I am asking this here is the link http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirect-help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Finding Duplicate Content Spanning more than one Site?
Hi forum, SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site to another site to see if they share "duplicate content?" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
SEOMOZ duplicate page result: True or false?
SEOMOZ say's: I have six (6) duplicate pages. Duplicate content tool checker say's (0) On the physical computer that hosts the website the page exists as one file. The casing of the file is irrelevant to the host machine, it wouldn't allow 2 files of the same name in the same directory. To reenforce this point, you can access said file by camel-casing the URI in any fashion (eg; http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm). This does not bring up a different file each time, the server merely processes the URI as case-less and pulls the file by it's name. What is happening in the example given is that some sort of indexer is being used to create a "dummy" reference of all the site files. Since the indexer doesn't have file access to the server, it does this by link crawling instead of reading files. It is the crawler that is making an assumption that the different casings of the pages are in fact different files. Perhaps there is a setting in the indexer to ignore casing. So the indexer is thinking that these are 2 different pages when they really aren't. This makes all of the other points moot, though they would certainly be relevant in the case of an actual duplicated page." ****Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://www.agi-automation.com/ 43 82 http://www.agi-automation.com/index.html 25 2 http://www.agi-automation.com/Linear-escapements.htm 21 1 www.agi-automation.com/linear-escapements.htm 16 1 http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm 30 3 http://www.agi-automation.com/pneumatic-grippers.htm 16 1**** Duplicate content tool estimates the following: www and non-www header response; Google cache check; Similarity check; Default page check; 404 header response; PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AGIAutomation0