Duplicate Content
-
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress).
so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way.
thanks
-
Greg
Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything
"Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different."
Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag.
"Remove the tags"
By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index.
"If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages."
You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages.
Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused.
Thanks again!
-Dan
-
Justin
Sorry to hear of your trouble with making the new settings. For one, my guide on SEOmoz about setting up WordPress for SEO should be helpful. I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with that.
In these cases - the "duplicate content" is usually not the page its self but rather usually just the title tags.
This is because, imagine you have tag archives like this;
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/2/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/3/
Usually the title tags respectably end up being the same;
- Pink Elephants | My Domain
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 2
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 3
For every single tag "subpage".
Normally, the protocol would be to;
- Noindex subpages
- Noindex tags
- Noindex dated archives
- Disable author archives (single author blog only)
- Index categories
You can still link to tag pages and use tags within the site all you want, but you just don't want to index them.
These are just default settings. Its impossible to know exactly what you should be doing without seeing your site, but I hope all of that gets you in the right direction!
-Dan
-
You should only no-follow your tags and archives and not your categories...
In the plugin settings, under permalinks, there is an option
"Strip the category base (usually
/category/
) from the category URL." this will just stop the duplicate pages from appearing,Blocking the category's must have caused the drop.
Greg
-
Changed to Yoast. I ticked no follow on archives, categories, and tags. One hour later, website went from #7 to page four.
-
Well, the duplicate content is causing issues alone.. Google does not like duplicate pages at all...
If you select which are your primary pages, and tell google to ignore the rest, it can only help your ranking.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, all you need to do is set tags to no-follow and no-index, and also strip the category from the URL. (it redirects automatically, as well)
Greg
-
Thanks for the reply. Would this affect ranking or can it be left alone ?
-
Wordpress does this when you use tags....
Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different.
2 Options that i can think of.
1.) Remove the tags and strip the category segment in the URL and stop using them in future. This will require redirects from duplicate URL"s to the main article (this will take planning, allot of time and is quite complicated)
2.) If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages. This tells Google were the original page can be found. Tags are only their for user experience so you can set these to no-follow and no-index.
Greg
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
-
Duplicate content question
Hey Mozzers! I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit. I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer. I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue: Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose. Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right. Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site). Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case? Thanks in advance for your help. AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Duplicate content on job sites
Hi, I have a question regarding job boards. Many job advertisers will upload the same job description to multiple websites e.g. monster, gumtree, etc. This would therefore be viewed as duplicate content. What is the best way to handle this if we want to ensure our particular site ranks well? Thanks in advance for the help. H
Technical SEO | | HiteshP0 -
How to avoid duplicate content when blogging from a site
I have a wordpress plastic surgery website. I have a wordpress blog on the site. My concern is avoiding duplicate content penalties when I blog. I use my blog to add new information about procedures that have pages on the same topic on the main site. Invariably same keywords and phrases can appear in the blog-will this be considered Duplicate content? Also is it black hat to insert anchor text in a blog linking back to site content-ie internal link or is one now and then helpful
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Duplicate Content - Reverse Phone Directory
Hi, Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors. Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position. Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain. I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
404's and duplicate content.
I have real estate based websites that add new pages when new listings are added to the market and then deletes pages when the property is sold. My concern is that there are a significant amount of 404's created and the listing pages that are added are going to be the same as others in my market who use the same IDX provider. I can go with a different IDX provider that uses IFrame which doesn't create new pages but I used a IFrame before and my time on site was 3min w/ 2.5 pgs per visit and now it's 7.5 pg/visit with 6+min on the site. The new pages create new content daily so is fresh content and better on site metrics (with the 404's) better or less 404's, no dup content and shorter onsite metrics better? Any thoughts on this issue? Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220