Duplicate content issue
-
Hi everyone,
I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have.
www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116
Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it?
At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content.
Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content?
Thank you!
-
Thank you guys for being so helpful!!:)
-
Hello Jeff, I would like to say first that lots of sites have duplicate content problems. For the most part, this is not a huge issue. When search engines find duplicate content they choose one of the pages to list in the index, and then will ignore the other. This assumes, of course, that the nature of the duplicate content is not so bad that it would lead to the search engine wanting to ban you. This can happen if a review of your situation causes them to believe that you are deliberately trying to rank multiple times for the same search terms.
Here is a link that fixes the problem of duplicate content :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
Let me try.
1. The answer to your first question is that it only matters if you're trying to figure out how to handle it programmaticaly. In this case you might have to ask the developer if this is being done by a session id. To me it looks more like a URL parameter, but without a live example I wouldnt know, could you provide the website in question? If not try visiting the website once, clear your cache and then visit again and see if the number after "return_id" changes. if it changes that is a session id. If it stays the same have a friend visit the website in the same manor and see if the number stays the same, if it changes then there's a good chance that this is a session id.
No matter if it's a session id adding it or not "return_id" is technically a URL parameter that is triggered by a session id.
2. The second question is still a bit vague, so let me see if this is correct. are you asking how to treat the duplicate content once you know what is causing it? If so, then follow these rules.
If the content changes significantly in the presence of the session id or parameter then this is not duplicate content. If the content does change do the following:
- make sure to use rel canonical for the root URL. In your example that would be: www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar
- set the URL parameters in Google and Bings webmaster tools to treat the parameter correctly.
- When the parameter or session id is present add the noindex, follow robots tag. this will allow the bots to spider through and pass on link juice in the event that someone links to your parameter versions
I think you have a larger issue, which is that your website's code is using the index.php to generate all of the pages, in the example that is calendar. This is a common mistake that programmers make since they work to do things as quickly and efficiently as possible. Its far easier to keep all of the code in the one file than to create several different dynamic files that work with each other.
If you dont have the ability to break this down and generate out different pages you might be able to use URL Rewrites to make browsers and bots think the URLs are actually different.
-
Thank you for your answers but I guess I didn't formulate properly my question.
My 1st question was: What kind of duplicate content is it?
- session id
- or url parameter
My second question is: How do you differentiate them? What do you look at when a duplicate content is a session id one or a url parameter issue?
-
You can determine if you have duplicate content several ways. search in google site:example.com and see how many pages google knows at your website. Also, when you are on page with this crazy url, open source code and see if a page has rel="canonical" tag. In your page that would be the best solution to signal robot that this is the same page as your index.php page.
Also, you can try Xenu. good and fast program to run your site on duplicates.
Hope it helps, you can show your website so we can take a look.
-
Hi Jeff,
index.php is the same as index.php?something=something&anotherthing=somethinglese
Each page should have a different url like index.php and page.php instead of always using index.php
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
-
How to stop /tag creating duplicate content - Wordpress
Hi, I keep getting alert for duplicate content. It seems Wordpress is creating it through a /tag https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/cipr/ https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/pr-agencies/ Something in the way we've got Wordpress set up?
Technical SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Car Dealership website - Duplicate Page Content Issues
Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | karl621 -
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 -
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Duplicate content - wordpress image attachement
I have run my seomoz campaign through my wordpress site and found duplicate content. However, all of this duplicate content was either my logo or images and no content with addresses like /?attachement_id=4 for example . How should I resolve this? thank you.
Technical SEO | | htmanage0 -
Duplicate page content errors in SEOmoz
Hi everyone, we just launched this new site and I just ran it through SEOmoz and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors. Here's one example -- it says these 3 are duplicate content: http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-black-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-camel-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-gray-3inch You'll see from the pages that the titles, images and small pieces of the copy are all unique -- but there is some copy that is the same (after all, these are pretty much the same shoe, just a different color). So, why am I getting this error and is there any best way to address? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | ketanmv
Ketan0