What's the best way to solve this sites duplicate content issues?
-
Hi,
The site is www.expressgolf.co.uk and is an e-commerce website with lots of categories and brands.
I'm trying to achieve one single unique URL for each category / brand page to avoid duplicate content and to get the correct URL's indexed.
Currently it looks like this...
Main URL
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green
Different Versions
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1/
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2/
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3/
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4/
http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all/
Firstly, what is the best course of action to make all versions point to the main URL and keep them from being indexed - Canonical Tag, NOINDEX or block them in robots?
Secondly, do I just need to 301 the (/) from all URL's to the non (/) URL's ?
I'm sure this question has been answered but I was having trouble coming to a solution for this one site.
Cheers,
Paul
-
Greetings Champion!
Cannonical Linking is the best way to go!
For your conundrum in Example B with the Calvin Green I would find out which URL version is dominant or has the most link juice and structure the redirects to that links. For instance, let us say [http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/] is the dominant link I would have the copy urls pointing back to that one like so
I manage an Ecommerce Site as well, I had the same issue with the categories and what I basically did the same thing for each level of my site, categories that have the url ending in /1, /2, /3 and so on I would redirect to the first page to make that Url stronger.
Practically think about what Noindexing or Nofollowing would do, you would lose so much link power that you could harness, With redirects you can focus this power in a more effective manner.
Also I was snooping and clicked Golf Clubs which took me to this URL
expressgolf.co .uk/shop/clubs
Made me realize that you had "clubs" at the end, I would put Golf Clubs because when you do a keyword search for Clubs, Bars come up. Putting a Keyword in the URL can greatly enhance that URL. Just a tip if you want to utilize it or not friend ^.^.
Good luck on your quest for Page 1!
Justin Smith
-
It really sounds like canonical is what you need here. Here is Matt Cutts explaining:
-
Hi,
I would say canonical or rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Would probably be your best bets, as a 301 would solve from a Search Engine perspective, but definitely not good for users wanting to see different versions of the product in question.
hope this helps
w00t!
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
-
Database driven content producing false duplicate content errors
How do I stop the Moz crawler from creating false duplicate content errors. I have yet to submit my website to google crawler because I am waiting to fix all my site optimization issues. Example: contactus.aspx?propid=200, contactus.aspx?propid=201.... these are the same pages but with some old url parameters stuck on them. How do I get Moz and Google not to consider these duplicates. I have looked at http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content with respect to Rel="canonical" and I think I am just confused. Nick
Technical SEO | | nickcargill0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hello all, we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day. This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds. We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice. Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way. What do you think & suggest? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | pkontopoulos0 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0 -
How Best to Handle 'Site Jacking' (Unauthorized Use of Someone else's Dedicated IP Address)
Anyone can point their domain to any IP address they want. I've found at least two domains (same owner) with two totally unrelated domains (to each other and to us) that are currently pointing their domains to our IP address. The IP address is on our dedicated server (we control the entire physical server) and is exclusive to only that one domain (so it isn't a virtual hosting misconfiguration issue) This has caused Google to index their two domains with duplicate content from our site (found by searching for site:www.theirdomain.com) Their site does not come up in the first 50 results though for any of the keywords we come up for so Google obviously knows THEY are the dupe content, not us (our site has been around for 12 years - much longer than them.) Their registration is private and we have not been able to contact these people. I'm not sure if this is just a mistake on the DNS for the two domains or it is someone doing this intentionally to try to harm our ranking. It has been going on for a while, so it is most likely not a mistake for two live sites as they would have noticed long ago they were pointing to the wrong IP. I can think of a variety of actions to take but I can find no information anywhere regarding what Google officially recommends doing in this situation, assuming you can't get a response. Here's my ideas. a) Approach it as a Digital Copyright Violation and go through the lengthy process of having their site taken down. Pro: Eliminates the issue. Con: Sort of a pain and we could be leaving possibly some link juice on the table? b) Modify .htaccess to do a 301 redirect from any URL not using our domain, to our domain. This means Google is going to see several domains all pointing to the same IP and all except our domain, 301 redirecting to our domain. Not sure if THAT will harm (or help) us? Would we not receive link juice then from any site out there that was linking to these other domains? Con: Google will see the context of the backlinks and their link text will not be related at all to our site. In addition, if any of these other domains pointing to our IP have backlinks from 'bad neighborhoods' I assume it could hurt us? c) Modify .htaccess to do a 404 File Not Found or 403 forbidden error? I posted in other forums and have gotten suggestions that are all over the map. In many cases the posters don't even understand what I'm talking about - thinking they are just normal backlinks. Argh! So I'm taking this to "The Experts" on SEOMoz.
Technical SEO | | jcrist1 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0