Duplicate Page Content for www and non-www. Help!
-
Hi guys, having a bit of a tough time here...
MOZ is reporting duplicate content for 21 pages on eagleplumbing.co.nz, however the reported duplicate is the www version of the page.
For example: http://eagleplumbing.co.nz and http://www.eagleplumbing.co.nz are considered duplicates (see screenshot attached)
Currently in search console I have just updated the non-www version to be set as the preferred version (I changed this back and forth twice today because I am confused!!!).
Does anyone know what the correct course of action should be in this case?
Things I have considered doing include: changing the preferred version to the www version in webmaster tools, setting up 301 redirects using a wordpress plugin called Eggplant 301 redirects.
I have been doing some really awesome content creation and have created some good quality citations, so I think this is only thing that is eaffecting my rank.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-
Ahh great stuff. Glad you managed to track it down
-Andy
-
Awesome thanks for the tip Andy, but I think I may have found the issue.
There were multiple Google Search Console accounts set up and running, creating two instances of the same site! I had access to one of them but when consulting the client I discovered that we were looking at different data, and hence my need for some explanation.
-
Hi Andrew,
You need to be editing your .htaccess file to forward from one to another if Wordpress isn't getting it right.
In the Wordpress General Settings, just make sure that both URL's are set to your preferred version (www or non-www) and if this doesn't work, a bit of .htaccess code will cure it for you.
Add this to your .htaccess if required:
<code>RewriteEngineOn RewriteBase/ RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST}^www\.(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L] -Andy</code>
-
So I set up 301 ...and it took the site down saying it has caused a redirect loop. Not good.
Anyone else got any good ideas?
-
Thanks DennisSeymour,
what should I be looking for in the Settings>General?
-
Hi!
Pick one of them. Probably the non-www version as that's the indexed one in Google
Next, 301 the www to non-www.
Wordpress handles that flawlessly so Im not sure why its not redirecting you correctly. Maybe check your Settings->General or check your htaccess if something changed.
It should always redirect.
That should fix your issue so you can continue with the other important stuff that you are doing.
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 problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Need Help With WWW vs. Non-WWW Duplicate Pages
A friend I'm working with at RedChairMarket.com is having duplicate page issues. Among them, both www and non-www URLs are being generated automatically by his software framework, ASP.net mvc 3. How should we go about finding and tackling these duplicates? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
I need help compiling solid documentation and data (if possible) that having tons of orphaned pages is bad for SEO - Can you help?
I spent an hour this afternoon trying to convince my CEO that having thousands of orphaned pages is bad for SEO. His argument was "If they aren't indexed, then I don't see how it can be a problem." Despite my best efforts to convince him that thousands of them ARE indexed, he simply said "Unless you can prove it's bad and prove what benefit the site would get out of cleaning them up, I don't see it as a priority." So, I am turning to all you brilliant folks here in Q & A and asking for help...and some words of encouragement would be nice today too 🙂 Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
Duplicate Content
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
One landing page with lots of content or content hub?
Interested in getting some opinions on if it's better to build one great landing page with tons of content or build a good landing page and build more content (as blog posts?) and interlink them back to the landing/hub page? Thoughts and opinions? Chris
Technical SEO | | sanctuarymg0 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590