Resurrecting a heavily duplicated Joomla website.
-
The site in question is stanwix.info.
I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo. It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz.
Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast.
As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly.
OR
do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project. I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time.
The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with.
Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.
-
Here are my suggestions
- While upgrading software is typically a good thing, it sounds like you're possibly going to break things by doing it (I would assume we're talking major version changes, not patch levels). I would make sure of what you're going to break before doing it. At least make a test copy somewhere and monkey with it there. NEVER "tinker" with your live site.
- There are scripts that can export Joomla sites. If you do switch software, be meticulous in your 301s or take a ranking bath.
- Canonical your site. That will fix the duplicate problem easily.
- Why Wordpress? Consider a forum instead. A forum invites conversation and natively creates fresh content.
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
-
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Big Mess - Multiple Websites
I have a customer, a Psychologist, who put up +/-20 websites many years ago. He has 1 main site (with his name as the domain) with hundreds of pages of quality content. The other sites are all exact match domains - anxiety counseling, couples counseling, etc. Some are single page sites, others have a good amount of quality content. Many of the EMD sites were getting ranked on the first page, as was the main site. The money site was ranking on the first page for the best keywords All of the EMD pages linked back to the main site, many with site wide footer links. The main site did not link back. All of the sites are on the same IP address. These sites have been in place for years. I don't believe that he has a duplicate content problem. About 8 weeks ago, the rankings for the main site crashed, moving 10 or more SERP pages deep. The EMD sites are still ranking. He has not gotten any nasty-grams from Google in Webmaster Tools. The Psychologist relies exclusively on organic for his business, and it has taken a significant hit. 1. Has anyone else seen this happen? 2. Is it safe to assume that Google finally nailed him for using a linking scheme? 3. How can we unwind this? The other sites are still generating business, and if those go away, he is really screwed. 4. Will taking down all of the links from the other sites be enough? Would moving the money site to another hosting company on a different IP make a difference? Ideas? I think the white hat answer would be to take down the EMD sites, and 301 redirect to the main site. The problem is that the loss of business from this process could be catastrophic.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Only my website homepage is appearing in search and the other indvidual pages are not coming up?This happened after the website revamp
We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason
Technical SEO | | Muna0 -
A problem with duplicate content
I'm kind of new at this. My crawl anaylsis says that I have a problem with duplicate content. I set the site up so that web sections appear in a folder with an index page as a landing page for that section. The URL would look like: www.myweb.com/section/index.php The crawl analysis says that both that URL and its root: www.myweb.com/section/ have been indexed. So I appear to have a situation where the page has been indexed twice and is a duplicate of itself. What can I do to remedy this? And, what steps should i take to get the pages re-indexed so that this type of duplication is avoided? I hope this makes sense! Any help gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?
Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days. After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago. Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Thank you!
Technical SEO | | tact0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
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 content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0