Duplicate Content?
-
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.)
But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it?
Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
-
Cool. No worries
StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.
If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect
You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Yes, on Google webmaster...sorry. And it's apache.
thank u!
-
Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.
That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.
Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!
Mike
-
HI Mike,
Thank you. To change all the titles is a huge task, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think I'll put them in a folder and mark the page link to that folder with a nofollow. As to the canoncalization of the two names, I have marked one of them as the top one in Google Analytics. But I have a much greater problem than that. I have several domain names that are on the same server and that all point to the one domain (same files and folders). I have been attempting to get my server techs to do a 301 redirect so that only http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com displays in a browser. However, every time they attempt to do it, part or all of my site stops working correctly.
-
You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.
I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com
The issue with this, that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.
As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.
Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results. The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.
If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.
That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.
The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!
I hope that helps.
Mike
-
thank u. I'm gonna do that!
-
Hi Mike,
That was fast. I copied some of the report from Seomoz "Crawled Diagnostics." Some do have the same titles, which was an edition after many years. The early newsletters I didn't even title, so they have a "default title" of the url.
I happened on SEOmoz, because I am trying to figure out why after so many years of having been on the first or second page of Google search results, we are lucky to show up on page 10 or deeper, if at all.
So I'm trying out SEOmoz to see if this will help us get back on top!
|
The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr10.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr08.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr09.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Feb06.html
-
Hi Sarah,
If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.
What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?
Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.
The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.
If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.
... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.
Hope this helps,
Mike
-
The best way to go is to put all your newsletters in on folder and and disallow the folder in your robot.txt.
rel nofollow & robot.txt are only read by google bot, your visitors won't be affected and will be able to navigate & search the archives without problem.
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 when working with makes and models?
Okay, so I am running a store on Shopify at the address https://www.rhinox-group.com. This store is reasonably new, so being updated constantly! The thing that is really annoying me at the moment though, is I am getting errors in the form of duplicate content. This seems to be because we work using the machine make and model, which is obviously imperative, but then we have various products for each machine make and model. Have we got any suggestions on how I can cut down on these errors, as the last thing I want is being penalised by Google for this! Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | josh.sprakes1 -
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
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 -
Why are these two URLs showing in Moz as duplicate content?
Here is the first URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/FBPP0000012376.asp Here is the 2nd URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/flag-spreader.asp Granted I am new to this issue on this website, but what is Roger seeing that I'm not? A lot of our duplicate pages are just like this example.
Technical SEO | | Flaglady0 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
Technical SEO | | sdennison0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0