Fix Duplicate Content Before Migration?
-
My client has 2 Wordpress sites (A and B).
Each site is 20 pages, with similar site structures, and 12 of the pages on A having nearly 100% duplicate content with their counterpart on B. I am not sure to what extent A and/or B is being penalized for this.
In 2 weeks (July 1) the client will execute a rebrand, renaming the business, launching C, and taking down A and B. Individual pages on A and B will be 301 redirected to their counterpart on C.
C will have a similar site structure to A and B. I expect the content will be freshened a bit, but may initially be very similar to the content on A and B.
I have 3 questions:
-
Given that only 2 weeks remain before the switchover - is there any purpose in resolving the duplicate content between A and B prior to taking them down?
-
Will 301 redirects from penalized pages on A or B actually hurt the ranking of the destination page on C?
-
If a page on C has the same content as its predecessor on A or B, could it be penalized for that, even though the page on A or B has since been taken down and replaced with a 301 redirect?
-
-
I've had similar questions regarding duplicate content. Thanks for the helpful answer and link!
-
-
Definitely not.
-
Hard to say for sure but I really doubt it. You can't actually get penalised for duplicate content so if anything I'd say it's a positive signal that 2 duplicate sets have been consolidated.
-
No. Theoretically there may be a window there where the new site is crawled before Google has noticed that the old one is no longer live (rankings are done based on their cached version, not the live site so if they still have the old site in cache, to Google it's still considered live) but that's both temporary and unlikely to have any measurable impact.
I'm working through a similar situation for a client at the moment where I'm waiting on their dev team to finish up the new site and I have a bunch of rubbish pages I want to do away with. The most efficient way to deal with both situations given they're just a couple of weeks away is to wait for the new site.
Hope that helps!
-
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
-
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add. Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content? Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content, the distrubutors are copying the content of the manufacturer
Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
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 -
Duplicate Page Content
We have different plans that you can signup for - how can we rectify the duplicate page content and title issue here? Thanks. | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=100 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=104 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=116 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=117 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=102 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=119 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=101 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=103 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=5 |0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0