Dulpicate Content being reported
-
Hi
I have a new client whose first MA crawl report is showing lots of duplicate content.
The main batch of these are all the HP url with an 'attachment' part at the end such as:
www.domain.com/?attachment_id=4176
As far as i can tell its some sort of slide show just showing a different image in the main frame of each page, with no other content. Each one does have a unique meta title & H1 though.
Whats the best thing to do here ?
-
Not a problem and leave as is
-
Use the paremeter handling tool in GWT
-
Canonicalise, referencing the HP
or other solution ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
-
Hi Dan,
Actually it looks like ctrl L will do it (you are creating an excel table). You usually need to erase the first few rows from the export so you have the column header in row 1 and then select all and create the table checking the 'my table has headers' so that you can then filter using the headers
-
Sorry Lynn but what is the 'windows' bit in control-windows-L since cant see on my keyboard, can it have a different icon/symbol etc?
-
Great stuff thanks Lynn !! Ill tell their dev to do that
many many thanks
All Best
Dan
-
cool cheers Don
-
Hi Dan,
The robots must be getting the urls from somewhere so it is worth finding out where. If you download the moz report in csv and open in excel you can control-windows-L to get a filterable list. If you filter for duplicates and find these urls on the left then on the far right it should reference where they are being linked from. I suspect you will find pages in the site that have these images in them and are linking to the attachment_id urls (often it is from gallery pages).
Once you have found the pages, then try applying the yoast redirects and see if they work as expected (ie redirect the attachment_id links to the relevant gallery page for example). Ideally you would get rid of the links completely from the code - this will probably need a bit of dev work on the template but should be pretty straightforward since you are likely just removing the A tag from around the images.
-
Gotcha, definitely don't want to nix pages then. I would imagine Lynn's response is more appropriate then, it is likely that he is using a plugin that has been updated to better SEO practices that he hasn't yet updated.
-
Many thanks Don
ill ask client but dont think so (doubt any links pointing to them) but due to varying kw rich meta titles and h1's think client may have implemented this for some seo reason (hes very seo savvy but bit old school) prob not aware needs more content on page beyond a pic & some meta & an h1.
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
All Best
Dan
-
Thanks Lyn
Yes it is wp i think
If i click on the image it loads page with image (another duplicate) in the series next
I'm not sure what the normal page is since can only find these via the cralw reports, they dont seem to be linked to in any site nav etc
Does that sound to you then like best solution is via Yoast redirects etc ?
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
If these pages have no SEO value then you can just stop them from being crawled, thus preventing any duplicate content penalties. If you see some backlinks (SEO value) to any of these then I would use Canonical.
robots.txt
User-agent:: *
Disallow: /*attachment_id
Hope it helps,
Don
-
Hi Dan,
Is the site running wordpress? If so it sounds like maybe a badly coded template which is showing links somewhere in the code to the attachments (if you click on the image in its normal page does it take you to the duplicate url you mention?). It would be best to find out where the linking is happening and correct it so the links are removed if at all possible. The Yoast plugin also has a setting where you can redirect attachment ids to their related post (its in the permalinks settings of the yoast plugin) - that might help solve the 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
-
Duplicate content
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Duplicated content on subcategory pages: how do I fix it?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
I manage an e-commerce website and we have a duplicated content issue for subcategory. The scenario is like this: /category1/subcategory1
/category2/subcategory1
/category3/subcategory1 A single subcategory can fit multiple categories, so we have 3 different URL for the same subcategory with the same content (except of the navigation link). Which are the best practice to avoid this issue? Thank you!0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0