Www.xyz.com v/s xyz.com creating duplicate pages
-
I just put my site in moz analytics. The crawl results says I have duplicate content. When I look at the pages it is because one page is www.xyz.com and the duplicate is xyz.com. What causes this and how can it be fixed. I'm not a developer, so be kind and speak a language I can understand.
Thanks for your help
-
Hi Viresh,
The 301 redirect option is perfect, and so is using the canonical tag to point one "version" of the site to the other if you would rather do that - instructions for doing that are here. Just make sure, as you would with the redirect, the the canonical tag points on a page-by-page basis. That is, xyz.com/page31.html has a canonical tag on it pointing to www.xyz.com/page31.html, not to www.xyz.com/.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Yes, when you setup a website normally, this will usually be a default issue that needs to be addressed. It's an overall problem (though easy to fix) that has yet to be addressed. So, no, it's not your fault -- but it's on you and every other site owner to fix it.
-
The 'default' setup will be for no redirects to be in place. It's not that something was done incorrectly, but rather, a best practice for SEO was overlooked. It's not something your average Joe or webmaster with no SEO experience is likely going to.
-
I don't currently know which one is linked to more often. I will look into that. Thanks for that little tip and your fast response.
-
I get that!! Does this happen when a site is built? Does it just happen by default, or was something not done correctly when the site was built?
Thanks for your quick response
-
In your scenario, you will want to choose one or the other, and setup a force WWW (or non-WWW) 301 redirect. If your site is on a linux-based platform, that is accomplished with an htaccess file. If you are on a Windows-based server, you will need to use IIS (I think). A simple Google search for "force www redirect windows server" will likely return tons of solutions.
If you're on Wordpress or a similar CMS, it is usually very easy to do from within the backend. If you have no idea what server you're on, or what platform your site is built on, use builtwith.com to find out
How do you choose between www.example.com or just example.com? You'll want to go with the one that's linked to more often, and then work on sticking with that as often as possible in the future. The majority of the link juice that's pointing towards example.com will be transfered to www.example.com with the 301 redirect, so it's not like those links without WWW will be worthless. They only lose a very tiny amount of their value through the redirect. The good news is, you're fixing a big issue so it isn't going to get worse for you.
Let me know if you have more questions.
-
I hope this isn't too technical, but just do a 301 redirect from either www.xyz.com to xyz.com or vice versa (your choice) for all pages on your website. That should solve the issue! (You can and should also set one of those as the canonical domain in Google Webmaster Tools.)
If that doesn't make sense, just reply!
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
-
Woocommerce Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hi, I'm receiving a duplicate content error. It says that this url: https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41 is a duplicate of this: http://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum I'm using wordpress, woocommerce, and not really sure how to even address this. I tried adding this to .htaccess but it didn't redirect the url: 301 Redirects Redirect 301 https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41 http://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/ Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | a_toohill0 -
Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Good morning, Our developers have recently created a new site for our agency. The site is responsive for mobile/tablets. I've just put the site through Screaming Frog and I've been informed of duplicate H2s. When I've looked at some of the page sources, there are some instances of duplicated H2s and duplicated content. These duplicates don't actually appear on the site, only in the code. When I asked the development guys about this, they advised this is duplicated because of the code for the responsive site. Will the site be negatively affected because of this? Not everything is duplicated, which leads me to believe it probably could have been designed better... but I'm no developer so don't know for sure. I've checked the code for other responsive sites and no duplicates can be found. Thanks in advance, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Advice on Duplicate Page Content
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them. For example - http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
Technical SEO | | jsmoz
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs We have many such pages. Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?0 -
Over 700+ duplicate content pages -- help!
I just signed up for SEO Moz pro for my site. The initial report came back with over 700+ duplicate content pages. My problem is that while I can see why some of the content is duplicated on some of the pages I have no idea why it's coming back as duplicated. Is there a tutorial for a novie on how to read the duplicate content report and what steps to take? It's an e-commerce website and there is some repetitive content on all the product pages like our "satisfaction guaranteed" text and the fabric material... and not much other text. There's not a unique product description because an image speaks for itself. Could this be causing the problem? I have lots of URLs with over 50+ duplicates. Thx for any help.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Expired Domain - http:// or www
I have an old domain - When i use the link explorer i get way more juice out of the www version of my domain. I will be using wordpress to set up a new domain with the same name . My question is - How do I make it proper for seo? Do i just change the http:// to www in wordpress and be done with it? Does it even matter (thinking it does)
Technical SEO | | imagatto20 -
Penalization for Duplicate URLs with %29 or "/"
Hi there - Some of our dynamically generated product URLs somehow are showing up in SEOmoz as two different URLs even though they are the same page- one with a %28 and one with a 🙂 e.g., http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ Also, some of the URLs are duplicated with a "/" at the end of them. Does Google penalize us for these duplicate URLs? Should we add canonical tags to all of them? Finally, our development team is claiming that they are not generating these pages, and that they are being generated from facebook/pinterest/etc. which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is that right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
Duplicate Page title - PHP Experts!
After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation. for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose. .com/?lang=en&limit=5 .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
Technical SEO | | nahopkin
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25 Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated. What should i do?0