Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
-
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content.
The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime
] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit.
Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 !
Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
-
Hi Jen
We are in the fortunate/crazy situation where we have a custom CMS so the actual redirects are not really a problem from a technical standpoint, it is just wondering if we should
The main site - the biggest and busiest - has a discussion board and a shop, and a blog which the others don't so the articles are about 10% of the indexed content, and about 11% are unique.. the other 2 sites, one has 0.003% unique articles and the other 1.829% ... sounds pretty bad when I put it like that!
We haven't seen a noticeable dip, just general disappointing performance, I think I will try and rope someone into doing a full CSI on the data
Have you seen anywhere that has recovered from a comparable situation? The pondering at this end was that the damage was already done, and that was that.
thanks
-
Hi Fammy!
One thing you could do is to look at the dates the Panda updates hit (http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) against your website traffic for those dates. If you see a dip, you probably got hit.
If not, it's still possible that the duplicate content is holding back your visibility in the SERPs. You can sometimes guess this when you're adding new content and it doesn't really perform as you'd expect it to - but unfortunately, you won't know for sure until you take some action.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you risk getting hit in the future - for example, by a manual penalty - which could even result in the sites being removed.
263,114 is a huge number of duplicate articles and I was just wondering what proportion that is to your overall number of site pages. If it is quite a high percentage, the risk is obviously greater.
I'd recommend you take some action personally. Is there any pattern in the way the archive of articles is structured, to make it possible to write a catch-all 301 rule in your htaccess file that redirects them all to one of the three sites?
For example say your archived articles site in a folder called archive - you'd put this in the htaccess on sites 1 and 2:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase
RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)$ http://www.yoursite3.com/archive/$1 [R=301,L]
... and this would redirect anything in the archive directory to the archive directory on site 3, assuming the file names are exactly the same.
Alternatively if that's not an option, you could look at which of the articles have decent links going to them on sites 1 and 2, redirect those to chosen site 3 and remove the rest, cutting the workload down a little.
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 page content errors for Web App Login
Hi There I have 6 duplicate content errors, but they are for the WebApp login from our website. I have put a Noindex on the Sitemap to stop google from indexing them to see if that would work. But it didn't. These links as far as I can see are not even on the website www.skemaz.net, but are links beyond the website and on the Web App itself eg : <colgroup><col width="529"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Skemazer
| http://login.skemaz.net |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2Fchangepassword |
| http://login.skemaz.net/Login |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2FHome | Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards Sarah0 -
Subcategories within "New Arrivals" section - duplicate content?
Hi there, My client runs an e-commerce store selling shoes that features a section called "New Arrivals" with subcategories, such as "shoes," "wedges," "boots," "sandals," etc. There are already main subcategories on the site that target these terms. These are specifically pages for "New Arrivals - Boots," etc. The shoes listed on each new arrivals subcategory page are also listed in the main subcategory page. Given that there is not really any search volume for "Brand + new arrivals in boots," but lots of search volume for "Brand + boots," what is the proper way to handle these new arrivals subcategory pages? Should each subcategory have a rel=canonical tag pointing to the main subcategory? Should they be de-indexed? Should I keep them all indexed but try to make the content as unique as possible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate content: is it possible to write a page, delete it and use it for a different site?
Hi, I've a simple question. Some time ago I built a site and added pages to it. I have found out that the site was penalized by Google and I have neglected it. The problem is that I had written well-optimized pages on that site, which I would like to use on another website. Thus, my question is: if I delete a page I had written on site 1, can use it on page 2 without being penalized by Google due to duplicate content? Please note: site one would still be online. I will simply delete some pages and use them on site 2. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81 -
Mobile site version - Is it a duplication issue?
There is a blog www.blogname.com and someone creates 2 mobile versions: iphone.blogname.com mobile.blogname.com they are the perfect copy of www.blogname.com (articles, tags, links, etc etc) How Google will manage them? Right now, my article gets backlink by three sites www.blogname.com iphone.blogname.com mobile.blogname.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Greenman0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0