I have a duplicate content problem
-
The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?
-
Thanks for the help!
-
Hey Steve,
if you are searching for a good CMS take a look at contao (www.contao.org) a german open source CMS. I run it on a couple of sites such as (www.waescherei-suche.de). It's site-based and has everything out of the box (newsletter, calendar-entries, user management etc.) There are tons of plugins and upgrades for nearly all kind of purposes. If you run a small site with a few pages this might be the thing you are looking for.
Sebastian
EDIT: it's in English..
-
Thank you for helping me through this issue. I was worried I'd be facing a penalty for the duplicate content and am glad to get it corrected. This site has Drupal as it's CMS and it's been a bear trying to change/add/update anything. There are a number of problems with this site - it doesn't show the Description tags even though I have them filled out.You can see this on View Source that there's no Descriptions tags. Any changes I have wanted to make can't be changed like the Facebook button and Alt tags, by me anyway.
I'm working on a new Wordpress website to replace this one with. Again, thank you for your help!
Sincerely,
Steve
-
Hi Steve.
Log into Google WMT and go to the Home page. From there press the "Add a Site" button. You will most likely see the non-www version of your site listed. Add the www version of your site.
Next, go through the process of confirming your site. When your site was originally set up your website developer probably added the code to your web page or web server, so it may already be there. Try to confirm the code without actually adding anything to your site or server. If you receive an error, then go ahead and follow Google's instructions.
Once your site is verified, you will then be able to go to Site Configuration > Settings > Set Preferred Domain.
Decide which version you prefer for your site and stick with it. It looks like you are already set up to use "www" so I would recommend using that URL style unless you had a specific reason to change it.
EDIT: I can't help but offering a bit of feedback regarding your site. These are just suggestions so feel free to disregard any you don't care for:
-
Change the "Facebook" block to the same color as Facebook pages. Your current green color blends in too much with everything else. It needs to stand out and be easy to find.
-
Update your copyright to 2011
-
Add a meta description tag to your pages. This tag wont help you rank better, but it will often be visible to users and may influence whether they click through to your site.
-
Add ALT tags to your images, and try to align your image names with your keywords when possible. Presently they have names such as "teens" where "teen martial arts" might more accurately describe the image, and help you rank better.
You have other opportunities, but the above will help get you moving in the right direction. If you have a chance, I highly recommend reading the SEO Beginners Guide as it contains a lot of great information.
-
-
I would not worry too much about that info. You rank well for a term like "austin tx martial arts" so everything seems good.
On a sitenode: If you ever want to reuse content and check how similar two pages are you could use a service like http://utext.rikuz.com/en/ to test it algorythmically.
Hope this answers your questions.
-
Thank you for your help, but according to the Crawl Dignostics for this website's SEOMoz Campaign, I have 16 pages of duplicate content. Should I discard this info.?
-
A site:pmaaustin.com showed 19 pages indexed. All of which with www.
Calling a non www. version of a page returned
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:16:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.pmaaustin.com/index.php?q=node/18So everythings looks good....
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
SEO for video content that is duplicated accross a larger network
I have a website with lots of content (high quality video clips for a particular niche). All the content gets fed out 100+ other sites on various domains/subdomains which are reskinned for a given city. So the content on these other sites is 100% duplicate. I still want to generate SEO traffic though. So my thought is that we: a) need to have canonical tags from all the other domains/subdomains that point back to the original post on the main site b) probably need to disallow search engine crawlers on all the other domains/subdomains Is this on the right track? Missing anything important related to duplicate content? The idea is that after we get search engines crawling the content correctly, from there we'd use the IP address to redirect the visitor to the best suited domain/subdomain. any thoughts on that approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusROI0 -
Different language with direct translation: duplicate content, meta?
For a site that does NOT want a separate subdomain, or directory, or TLD for a country/language would the directly translated page (static) content/meta be duplicate? (NOT considering a translation of the term/acronym which could exist in another language) i.e. /SEO-city-state in English vs. /SEO-city-state Spanish -In this example a term/acronym that is the same in any language. Outside of duplicate content, are their other conflict potentials in rankings you can think of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bozzie3110 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
Usually when we discuss duplicate content, we're addressing the topic of penalties or non-indexing. In this case, we're discussing ranking high with duplicate content. I've seen lots of dental, chiropractor and veterinarian sites built by companies that give them cookie cutter sites with the same copy. And they all rank #1 or #2. Here are two companies that do that:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse
http://www.rampsites.com/rampsites/home_standard.asp?sectionid=4
http://mysocialpractice.com/about/ The later uses external blogs to provide inbound links to their clients' site, but not all services do that, in fact, this is the first time I've seen them with external blogs. Usually the blog with duplicate copy is ON SITE and the sites still rank #1. Query "Why Your Smile Prefers Water Over Soft Drinks" to see duplicate content on external blogs. Or "Remember the Mad Hatter from the childhood classic, Alice in Wonderland? Back then, the process of making hats involved using mercury compounds. Overexposure could produce symptoms referred to as being" for duplicate content on chiropractor sites that rank high. I've seen well optimized sites rank under them even though their sites have just as much quality content and it's all original with more engagement and inbound links. It appears to me that Google is turning a blind eye on duplicate content. Maybe because these are local businesses with local clientele it doesn't care that a chiropractor in NY has the same content as one in CA, just as the visitor doesn't care because the visitor in CA isn't look at a chiropractor's site in NY generally. So maybe geo-targeting the site has something to do with it. As a test, I should take the same copy and put it on a non-geo-targeted site and see if it will get indexed. I asked another Local SEO expert if she has run across this, probably the best in my opinion. She has and she finds it difficult to rank above them as well. It's almost as if Google is favoring those sites. So the question is, should all dentists, chiropractors and veterinarians give it up to these services? I shudder to think that, but, hey it's working and it's a whole lot less work - and maybe expense - for them.0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1