Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
-
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance
Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
another example
Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/
same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com
i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one???
thanks very much
-
Thanks Tim. Do you have any examples of what those problems might be? With such a large catalog managing those rel canonical tags will be difficult (I don't even know if the store allows them, it's a hosted store solution and little code customization is allowed).
-
Hi there AspenFasteners, in this instance rather than a .HTAccess rule I would suggest applying a rel canonical tag which points to the page you deem as the original master source.
Using the robots to try and hide things could potentially cause you more issues as your categories may struggle to be indexed correctly.
-
We have a similar problem, but much more complex to handle as we have a massive catalog of 80,000 products and growing.
The problem occurs legitimately because our catalog is so large that we offer different navigation paths to the same content.
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8314.htm
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8315.htm
(If you look at the "You are here" breadcrumb trail, you will see the subtle differences in the navigation paths, with 8314.htm, the user went through Home > Screws, with 8315.htm, via Home > Security Fasteners > Screws).
Our hosted web store does not offer us htaccess, so I am thinking of excluding the redundant navigation points via robots.txt.
My question: is there any reason NOT to do this?
-
Oh ok
The only reason i was thinking it is duplicate content is the warnings i got on the moz crawl, see below.
75 Duplicate Page Content
6 4xx Client Error
5 Duplicate Page Title
44 Missing Meta Description Tag
5 Title Element is Too Short
I have found over 80 typos, grammatical errors, punctuation errors and incorrect information which was leading me to believe the quality of the work and their attention to detail was rather bad, which is why i thought this was a possibility.
Thanks again for your time
its really appreciated
-
I wouldn't say that they have created two pages, it is just that because you have two versions of the domain and not set a preferred version that you are getting it indexing twice. .HTaccess changes are under the hood of the website and could have simply been an oversight.
-
Hey Tim
Thanks for your answer. It's really weird, other than lazyness on the devs part not to remove old or previous versions of pages?, have you any idea why they would create multiple versions of the same page with different url's?? is there any legit reason like ones severs mobile or something??
Just wondering
thanks for replying
-
OK, so in this instance the only issue you have is that you need to choose your preferred start point - www or non www.
I would add a bit of code to your htaccess file to point to your preferred choice. I personally prefer a www. domain. Something like the below would work.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]As your site is already indexed I would also for the time being and as more of a safety measure add canonicals to the pages that point to the www. version of your site.
Also if you have a Google Search Console account, you can select your prefered domain prefix in there. this will again help with your indexation.
Hopefully I have covered most things.
Cheers
Tim
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
-
My site in 2 page
my site in 2 page how can i rank with this keywords in dubai legal translation in Dubai
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | saharali150 -
Competitor ranking well with duplicate content—what are my options?
A competitor is ranking #1 and #3 for a search term (see attached) by publishing two separate sites with the same content. They've modified the title of the page, and serve it in a different design, but are using their branded domain and a keyword-rich domain to gain multiple rankings. This has been going on for years, and I've always told myself that Google would eventually catch it with an algorithm update, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Does anyone know of other options? It doesn't seem like this falls under any of the categories that Google lists on their web spam report page—is there any other way to get bring this up with the powers that be, or is it something that I just have to live with and hope that Google figures out some day? Any advice would help. Thanks! how_to_become_a_home_inspector_-_Google_Search_2015-01-15_18-45-06.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inxilpro0 -
Is using Zeus's gateway feature to display contents from the different URL OK to do?
I've been writing a blog on free hosting blog platform and planning to migrate that under my domain name as directory. myblog.ABCD.com to www.mydomain.com/myblog now, I've learned that my Zeus server has a way to show myblog.ABCD.com at mydomain.com/myblog without transferring anything by using the Gateway feature. This will save a lot of time and hassle for me, but my question is if this is ok to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HypermediaSystems
Is there a chance that this could be considered a blackhat even though the content is mine? From the Zeus documentation:
"Gateway aliases enable users to request files from the new
web server, and receive them as if they were on the new server, when they are
still located on the legacy server. To the user, the files appear to be located on
the new server. " Thank you.0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
Opinions sought on outbound Links page.
Hello Forum, I'm about the remove my outbound Links page at: http://www.pictureframe.com.au/---obs--picture-frames-links.html I think that Google could be assessing this page as a link scheme, ie: I-link-you-if-you-link me. I haven't received any messages from Google about this but I think the page may be devaluing my site. What do you guys~gals think? Thank you for any and all feedback Paul the Picture Framer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Picframer0 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0 -
Syndicated content outperforming our hard work!
Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. Our goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states. To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Wayne76
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content/media is 100% original. A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entries are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.) (I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances.) I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources??? The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well? Are they bound to fade away? While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states. OR Is our competitor's site bound to fade away? Thanks, gang, hope all of you have a great 2013! Wayne0 -
A domain is ranking for a plural key word in SERPs on page 1 but for the singular not at all?
What could the reasons that a domain is ranking for the plural version of a key word on SERPs page 1 and for the singular version not at all? Google knows that both key words belong together, as in the SERPs for one version also the other version of the key word is being highlighted. If I search for the domain with the plural keyword it shows up on the first page in SERPs, but If I search for the same keyword as singular (in German it is just removing an “s”) I see the plural version highlighted many times but I cannot find my domain. What could be the reason for this behavior? penalties?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SimCaffe0