How best to deal with internal duplicate content
-
hi
having an issue with a client site and internal duplicate content. The client has a custom cms and when they post new content it can appear, in full, at two different urls on the site. Short of getting the client to move cms, which they won't do, I am trying to find an easy fix that they could do themselves.
ideally they would add a canonical on one of the versions but the cms does allow them to view posts in html view, also would be a lot if messing about wth posting the page and then going back to the cms and adding the tag. the cms is unable to auto generate this either. The content editors are copywriters not programmers.
Would there be a solution using wmt for this? They have the skill level to be able to add a url in wmt so im thinking that a stop gap solution could be to noindex one of the versions using the option in webmaster tools. Ongoing we will consult developers about modifying the cms but budgets are limited so looking for a cheap and quick solution to help until the new year.
anyone know of a way other than wmt to block Google from seeing duplicate content. We can block Google from folders because only a small percentage of the content in the folder would be internally duplicate.
would be very grateful for any suggestions anyone could offer.
thanks.
-
Of course. No problem!
-
thanks for reminding me of the robots option. Overlooked that. Will propose it
-
Hi Carl,
If you have absolutely no way of adding a canonical tag or meta noindex tag to the individual pages then I believe, for now, disallowing the indexing of pages using robots.txt or the Remove URLs tool in GWT is your best option. You could also 301 redirect the duplicate page if you can edit an .htaccess file, although, this too should only be used as a temporary solution.
Here is some additional info about robots.txt if needed: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
Hope that helps!
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
-
How to deal with this duplicate content
Hello our websites offers prayer times in the US and UK. The problem is that we have nearby towns where the prayer times are the same and the pages (exp : https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-michigan-12258-en and https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-12147-en) are in duplicate . Same issue for this page https://prayer-time.uk/prayer-times-wallsend-411-en How can we solve this problem
On-Page Optimization | | Zakirou0 -
What constitutes duplicate content on a page?
I am working on SEO for a Shopify store. Their products are very similar, hence the pages are so similar that Moz shows them as duplicate content. The only difference in the product pages is the title and model number. I am going to "go for the gold" and try re-writing all the product descriptions. It's incredibly difficult due to the products being nearly identical with just a minor variation. I know I could go down the road of just creating variants --- but the customer is not down for that. Here's my question: what constitutes duplicate content? 80% of the content, 90%???? If I can going to re-write the descriptions, what should I aim for? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | steve_linn1 -
Duplicate content issues - page content and store URLs
Hi, I'm experiencing some heavy duplicate content Crawl errors on Moz with www.redrockdecals.com and therefore I really need some help. It brings up different connections between products and I'm having a hard time figuring out what it means. It is listing the same products as duplicate content but they have different URL endings. For example:http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=nl&___from_store=us
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird1229
&
http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=d&___from_store=us It seems like Moz considers the copy-pasted parts in the Full Description (scrolled a bit down on product pages) as Duplicate Content. For example the general text found on this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/caution-tow-limited-turning-radius-decal Or this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/if-you-don-t-succeed-first-time-then-skydiving-isn-t-for-you-bumper-sticker I am planning to write new and unique descriptions for all products but what do you suggest - should I either remove the long same descriptions or just shorten them perhaps so they don't outweigh the short but unique descriptions above? I've heard search engines understand that some parts of the page can be same on other pages but I wonder if in my case this has gone too deep... Thanks so much!0 -
Duplicate Content - What can be duplicate in two different product pages.
I am having a hard time understanding how my 3 different product pages are being shown up as Duplicate Content in s crawl. Some of my 21 different pages are being shown as duplicate content. Here are 3 of those: 1. http://champu.in/korn-rock-band-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 2. http://champu.in/stop-the-burning-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 3. http://champu.in/funny-t-shirts/absolut-punjabi-red-men-s-round-neck-t-shirt Can someone help me with this. Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | sidjain4you0 -
Duplicate content - Opencart
In my last report I have a lot of duplicate content. Duplicate pages are: http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=Сваров�% http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=бижу http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag=бижузо�%8 And a lot of more, starting with -- http://mysite.com/product/search&filter_tag= Any ideas? Maybe I should do something in robots.txt, but please tell me the exact code. Best Regards, Emil
On-Page Optimization | | famozni0 -
Checking for content originality in a site
two part question on original content How would you go about checking if a site holds original content accept the long search quary within Google? ans also if I find many sites carrying my content and I am the original source should I replace the content? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0 -
What is the best practice for optimizing international websites? We operate a .co.uk and .com and obviously content is similar.
We have two (and soon to be more) international websites, all in English. The sites in question are WebHostingBuzz.com and WebHostingBuzz.co.uk. Obviously content is similar as we're providing a similar service but from different locations and different prices. What is best practice here? Should we completely re-write the .co.uk content (this is the newer site) so it isn't penalized for scraping? Any hints/tips would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | mdrussell0