Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
-
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance
Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
another example
Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/
same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com
i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one???
thanks very much
-
Thanks Tim. Do you have any examples of what those problems might be? With such a large catalog managing those rel canonical tags will be difficult (I don't even know if the store allows them, it's a hosted store solution and little code customization is allowed).
-
Hi there AspenFasteners, in this instance rather than a .HTAccess rule I would suggest applying a rel canonical tag which points to the page you deem as the original master source.
Using the robots to try and hide things could potentially cause you more issues as your categories may struggle to be indexed correctly.
-
We have a similar problem, but much more complex to handle as we have a massive catalog of 80,000 products and growing.
The problem occurs legitimately because our catalog is so large that we offer different navigation paths to the same content.
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8314.htm
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8315.htm
(If you look at the "You are here" breadcrumb trail, you will see the subtle differences in the navigation paths, with 8314.htm, the user went through Home > Screws, with 8315.htm, via Home > Security Fasteners > Screws).
Our hosted web store does not offer us htaccess, so I am thinking of excluding the redundant navigation points via robots.txt.
My question: is there any reason NOT to do this?
-
Oh ok
The only reason i was thinking it is duplicate content is the warnings i got on the moz crawl, see below.
75 Duplicate Page Content
6 4xx Client Error
5 Duplicate Page Title
44 Missing Meta Description Tag
5 Title Element is Too Short
I have found over 80 typos, grammatical errors, punctuation errors and incorrect information which was leading me to believe the quality of the work and their attention to detail was rather bad, which is why i thought this was a possibility.
Thanks again for your time its really appreciated
-
I wouldn't say that they have created two pages, it is just that because you have two versions of the domain and not set a preferred version that you are getting it indexing twice. .HTaccess changes are under the hood of the website and could have simply been an oversight.
-
Hey Tim
Thanks for your answer. It's really weird, other than lazyness on the devs part not to remove old or previous versions of pages?, have you any idea why they would create multiple versions of the same page with different url's?? is there any legit reason like ones severs mobile or something??
Just wondering thanks for replying
-
OK, so in this instance the only issue you have is that you need to choose your preferred start point - www or non www.
I would add a bit of code to your htaccess file to point to your preferred choice. I personally prefer a www. domain. Something like the below would work.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]As your site is already indexed I would also for the time being and as more of a safety measure add canonicals to the pages that point to the www. version of your site.
Also if you have a Google Search Console account, you can select your prefered domain prefix in there. this will again help with your indexation.
Hopefully I have covered most things.
Cheers
Tim
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
-
Impact of wiping content on a subdomain
Hi, I've been asked to look at the impact of bulk deleting content on a blog subdomain and how it could impact the SEO of a linked www subdomain. Can deleting content on one subdomain have a negative impact on other linked subdomains? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | think-web0 -
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Unlisted (hidden) pages
I just had a client say they were advised by a friend to use 'a bunch of unlisted (hidden) pages'. Isn't this seriously black hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Can a hidden menu damage a website page?
Website (A) - has a landing page offering courses Website (B) - ( A different organisation) has a link to Website A. The goal landing page when you click on he link takes you to Website A's Courses page which is already a popular page with visitors who search for or come directly into Website A. Owners of Website A want to ADD an Extra Menu Item to the MENU BAR on their Courses page to offer some specific courses to visitors who come from Website (B) to Website (A) - BUT the additional MENU ITEM is ONLY TO BE DISPLAYED if you come from having clicked on the link at Website (B). This link both parties are intending to track However, if you come to the Courses landing page on Website (A) directly from a search engine or directly typing in the URL address of the landing page - you will not see this EXTRA Menu Item with its link to courses, it only appears should you visit Website (A) having come from Website (B). The above approach is making me twitch as to what the programmer wants to do as to me this looks like a form of 'cloaking'. What I am not understanding that Website (A) URL ADDRESS landing page is demonstrating outwardly to Google a Menu Bar that appears normal, but I come to the same URL ADDRESS from Website (B) and I end up seeing an ADDITIONAL MENU ITEM How will Google look at this LANDING PAGE? Surely it must see the CODING INSTRUCTIONS sitting there behind this page to assist it in serving up in effect TWO VERSIONS of the page when actually the URL itself does not change. What should I advise the developer as I don't want the landing page of Website (A) which is doing fine right now, end up with some sort of penalty from the search engines through this exercise. Many thanks in advance of answers from the community.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ICTADVIS0 -
Is using Zeus's gateway feature to display contents from the different URL OK to do?
I've been writing a blog on free hosting blog platform and planning to migrate that under my domain name as directory. myblog.ABCD.com to www.mydomain.com/myblog now, I've learned that my Zeus server has a way to show myblog.ABCD.com at mydomain.com/myblog without transferring anything by using the Gateway feature. This will save a lot of time and hassle for me, but my question is if this is ok to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HypermediaSystems
Is there a chance that this could be considered a blackhat even though the content is mine? From the Zeus documentation:
"Gateway aliases enable users to request files from the new
web server, and receive them as if they were on the new server, when they are
still located on the legacy server. To the user, the files appear to be located on
the new server. " Thank you.0 -
Should I ask for Nofollow on directory URLs?
Hi, I'm just putting pizza restaurant on various very relevant 'eating out' directories. Just noticed one directory then proceeds to place your listing on around 40 other sub-directories (each with own URL). They don't put <no follow="">tags on any of the 40 odd backlinking URLs.</no> I currently have around 300 existing backlinks, to this pizza restaurant, from a diverse range of sites. Should I ask them to put a nofollow on these 40 odd new backlinking directory URLs?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0