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
-
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Lot of duplicate content and still traffic is increasing... how does it work?
Hello Mozzers, I've a dilemma with a client's site I am working on that is make me questioning my SEO knowledge, or the way Google treat duplicate content. I'll explain now. The situation is the following: organic traffic is constantly increasing since last September, in every section of the site (home page, categories and product pages) even though: they have tons of duplicate content from same content in old and new URLs (which are in two different languages, even if the actual content on the page is in the same language in both of the URL versions) indexation is completely left to Google decision (no robots file, no sitemap, no meta robots in code, no use of canonical, no redirect applied to any of the old URLs, etc) a lot (really, a lot) of URLs with query parameters (which brings to more duplicated content) linked from the inner page of the site (and indexed in some case) they have Analytics but don't use Webmaster Tools Now... they expect me to help them increase even more the traffic they're getting, and I'll go first on "regular" onpage optimization, as their title, meta description and headers are not optimized at all according to the page content, but after that I was thinking on fixing the issues with indexation and content duplication, but I am worried I can "break the toy", as things are going well for them. Should I be confident that fixing these issues will bring to even better results or do you think is better for me to focus on other kind of improvements? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guybrush_Threepw00d0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0