Help With Duplicated Content
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am having some issue's with duplicated content, i recently removed the .html from all of our links and moz has reported it as being duplicated.
I have been reading up about Canonicalization and would to verify some details, when using the
canonical
tag would it be placed in the /mywebpage.html or /mywebpage file?I am having a hard time to sort this out so any help from you SEO experts would be great
I have also updated my htaccess file with the following
Thanks in advance
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks so much for your prompt reply, i will get those tags updated and await some help with the 301.
Is there anyone who could maybe help me out with the 301 redirect?
Thanks again
Alec
-
Hi there Alec
Regarding the canonical tag:
The tag you want to use should be the page that you want to keep, be identified as the original and want Google to rank. From what I gather, that would be this page: http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service
Therefore, on that page, you should have a canonical tag pointing to http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service - and on every subsequent duplicate page, you should have the same tag.
The tag effectively instructs Google to say "these other pages are duplicate versions of this URL, so I'm going to ignore those versions, not flag them as a problem, and just promote the original URL. What's the original URL? Here it is, it's http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service"
Sometimes making a robot appear human actually helps, ha!
An even better solution, which I believe you're trying to implement, would be to 301 redirect all of the URLs containing .html to their equivalent page without the .html extension in the URL. Not only does this remove the duplicate content problem, but it will also pass the SEO strength of the pages to the new one.
Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to help you there - don't want to recommend the wrong thing and mess up the .htaccess file! Hopefully someone more proficient in .htaccess redirects will come along and help you out there.
Hope my canonical explanation helps though!
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
-
Duplicated Content on Wordpress Mobile&Desktop versions- Is it bad for SEO?
Hello, I use a Wordpress theme for displaying mobile and desktop versions separately. The problem is that if you use tools like screaming frog or if you look at the code (view source), you can detect duplicated content. But if you're browsing on your mobile you will see only the content I have created for the mobile version and the same if you're looking at the desktop version, you will only see the desktop content.
On-Page Optimization | | AlphaRoadside
Is this creating an SEO problem? If it is, please let me know why and if it has a solution. Thanks in advance.0 -
Duplicate content query
I'm currently reauthoring all of the product pages on our site. Within the redesign of all the pages is a set of "why choose us?" bullet points and "what our customers say" bullet points. On every page these bullet points are the same. We currently have 18% duplicate content sitewide and I'm reluctant to push this. The products are similar but targeted at different professions, so I'm not sure whether to alter the text slightly for the bullet points on each page, remove the bullet points entirely or implement some form of canonicalisation that won't impact the profession-specific pages' ability to rank well.
On-Page Optimization | | EdLongley0 -
What to do with repetitive content
Hi, I recently took over a site from another SEO firm. They created lots of articles targeting the same terms. The articles aren't bad but I fear they could dilute the site's ranking power for a given term. I don't want to give away the specific industry, but let's say they have eight pages targeting the term "______ billing software." I'd rather focus their resources on ranking one page for that term. Does that make sense? And if so, how do I do that? The company has a writer that can see if any of the content is good enough to add to their primary ______ billing software page. Would you 301 redirect all these pages to the one you want to rank, or would you canonicalize them? Or am I way off base in my thinking?
On-Page Optimization | | rich.owings0 -
Identifying Duplicate Page Title
Moz weekly reports, among other things, the "Duplicate Page Title". How can I identify which two urls/pages have duplicate page titles? Is there any simple way to trace?
On-Page Optimization | | Sequelmed0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
Duplicate Content only an Issue on a Huge Scale?
To what extent is duplicate content an issue? We have a support forum with some duplicate content because users ask the same questions. The Moz reports we receive highlights our duplicate content and page title for our support forum as a "big" issue. I'm unsure to what extent it harms our SEO, and making the support section non-crawable would impair our level of support. It would be nice to know for sure if we should be concerned about this, and if yes, how can we do it differently? Thanks, I appreciate you help. -Allan
On-Page Optimization | | Todoist0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
Duplicate content Issue
I'm getting a report of duplicate title and content on: http://www.website.com/ http://www.website.com/index.php Of course, they're the same pages but does this need to be corrected somehow. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dbaxa-2613380