404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
-
Hi,
I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages.
For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page).
Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page?
Thanks!
-
I just did a check and you're right, even though these pages are showing up as errors to the user they are actually showing up as 200 OK, which is causing the duplicate content issue.
Thank you!
-
kfallconnect, if the 404 errors are being picked up as duplicate content, then most likely they're not actually showing up as 404 error pages. It's quite possible that it's a 404 error on the site (that's what the user sees) but, in fact, the server header is not displaying a 404 error. It could be showing up as a "200 OK".
First, I would identify the pages. If the user sees an error on the page, then that's fine. Use a server header check tool to see what the response code is when someone goes to the page. You can use something like Rex Swain's HTTP header tool to check it: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html . If the page shows a 404 error then you should be fine, it's not duplicate content.
If the page is showing a "200 OK" then it most likely IS duplicate content. If the page is showing an error to users but showing a '200 OK' in the server header, then that needs to be fixed.
But if the page is showing actual content (and not an error to visitors) then you need to look at potentially using the canonical tag or removing the content on the site completely (which is preferred).
-
I have not used Drupal for a couple of years, but there used to be a plugin called Fast 404 for some versions. Need to check whether suitable and if it weighs downs page speed. Zach is right if you can manually handle it do so, but if not perhaps research a plugin and research side effects.
-
We run on Drupal so I'm not sure if there is a 404 plug in
-
I had some issues with 404 errors as well.
Not sure how your site is set up but I just added permanent redirects on all the 404 duplicates I was having. I didn't have as many as you so it was pretty easy to do. I'm not sure if this is the 100% correct way of doing it but it fixed my issue.
Hope it helps!
-
I am not sure of the site is wordpress but have you considered 'smart 404' plugin. Could consider adding to the site, a solution.
Hope that assists.
Regards
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 problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
174 Duplicate Content Errors
How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags. Thank you in advance for any help! Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisarein0 -
Errors - 7300 - Duplicate Page Content..Help me..
Hi, I just received the crawl report with 7300 errors of duplicate page content. Site built using php. list of errors will be like this.. http://xxxxx.com/channels/ http://xxxxx.com/channels/?page=1 http://xxxxxx.com/channels/?page=2 I am not good in coding and using readymade script for this website. could anyone guide me to fix this issue? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | vilambara0 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
Why would SEOMoz and GWT report 404 errors for pages that are not 404ing?
Recently, I've noticed that nearly all of the 404 errors (not soft 404) reported in GWT actually resolve to a legitimate page. This was weird, but I thought it might just be old info, so I would go through the process of checking and "mark as fixed" as necessary. However, I noticed that SEOMoz is picking up on these 404 errors in the diagnostics of the site as well, and now I'm concerned with what the problem could be. Anyone have any insight into this? Rich
Technical SEO | | secretstache0 -
Question about content on ecommerce pages.
Long time ago we hired a seo company to do seo in our website and one of the things they did is that they wrote long text on the category pages of our products. Example here: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/refurbished-printers/wide-format-laser-refurbished-printers Now my marketing person is saying that if its possible to put the text below the items, technically I will find out how to do it, but from your seo experience, is it good or bad? What about if we short those texts to one paragraph only? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Seomoz is showing duplicate page content for my wordpress blog
Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at: http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO0