Duplicate content reported on WMT for 301 redirected content
-
We had to 301 redirect a large number of URL's. Not Google WMT is telling me that we are having tons of duplicate page titles. When I looked into the specific URL's I realized that Google is listing an old URL's and the 301 redirected new URL as the source of the duplicate content.
I confirmed the 301 redirect by using a server header tool to check the correct implementation of the 301 redirect from the old to the new URL.
Question: Why is Google Webmaster Tool reporting duplicated content for these pages?
-
Yeah, I think you are right. I am glad I checked 301 on WMT just to make sure there are no issues with the 301 redirect.
Cheers, C
-
No problem! Basically Google will recrawl the old URLs and should find the 301 itself. Your issue should resolve all by itself, just give it a few weeks. When it finds the redirect, it should remove the old URL from the index.
-
Mihai and SpyderTrap,
The 301 redirects were implemented in mid May. Grate idea about using Google fetch to check redirect. I checked and the redirects are ok (301).I guess it's possible that Google finds the new URL's using our directory (with updated URL's) and also has the old URL in it's index - hence "apparent" duplicate content.
Thanks for the input,
Christian
-
Hey Christian,
The issue here might be that Google still has a cache of the old URL before the 301 redirect. In that case, you'll just need to wait until the Google data centers refresh the data.
Also, instead of using a server header tool, you could use the Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google" option on the old URL, and click on the "Success" link to check how Googlebot retrieves the page (to make sure Googlebot sees the 301 header as well).
Cheers!
-
How long ago did you set up the 301 redirects?
It can take some time to show up in Google WMT's.
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
-
Selectively 301 redirects
Hi there: We are developing a pretty typical 301 redirection strategy. We basically are moving blog posts from a former sub-domain to the top level of our new designed site. We've pulled a site crawl of the old sub-domain and want to make sure we redirect any posts with a significant backlink profile to their current counterparts. Most other posts are just going to be redirected to the main 'front door' of our new blog. Is there a way to selectively redirect a certain number of posts and then 'globally' redirect everything else to a single URL? I would assume this would be a pretty common task, but can't find an easy way to do what we want to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
301 redirects for a redesign.
About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice. The current site is a old template site from another provider. They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product. So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site? I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what? The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage). But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition. Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must. I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now. Thanks for all your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonrj0 -
Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not. Here are some additional sample links: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Careerbags
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggallini All of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?0 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Redirecting a redirect - thoughts?
Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author? Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A. Will that work, or is there a better solution? This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My client's website is for an organization that is part of a larger organization - which has it's own website. We were given permission to use content from the larger organization's site on my client's redesigned site. The SEs will deem this as duplicate content, right? I can "re-write" the content for the new site, but it will still be closely based on the original content from the larger organization's site, due to the scientific/medical nature of the subject material. Is there a way around this dilemma so I do not get penalized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mills1