Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Solve duplicate content issues by using robots.txt
-
Hi,
I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok?
Thank for any help!
-
yes, robots.txt is the bad way, I will try to use canonical tag. Thanks for your help!
-
Using robots.txt is perhaps not the best way of doing it. Using the canonical or a noindex meta tag would likely be best. I think the reasons for this are best summed up in this article which explains, probably better than I could, why robots.txt is not the best way of dealing with duplicate content. Hope this helps.
-
I have tried to use cross-domain canonical, but this is too difficult for me. So, I want to confirm if I use the robots.txt file is ok or not?
Thanks
-
Why not use a cross-domain canonical whereby you reference the pages on your primary website as the canonical version on your secondary websites, thereby eliminating the duplication.
For example on each page that is duplicate on your secondary website you would add the following to the head to reference the primary pages:
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 - Bulk analysis tool?
Hi I wondered if there's a tool to analyse duplicate content - within your own site or on external sites, but that you can upload the URL's you want to check in bulk? I used Copyscape a while ago, but don't remember this having a bulk feature? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | BeckyKey0 -
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having duplicate content. I mean somewhere google says they will prefer original content & will give preference to them who have original content but this statement contradict when I see Indeed.com as they aggregate content from other sites but still rank higher than original content provider side. How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
If I enbed the same video from my YouTube account on two different websites, will I get a duplicate content penalty?
I have a YouTube video I want to show my B2B and B2C customers. But I have a different websites for each. If I embed the video will I get duplicate content strike against me?
On-Page Optimization | | RoxBrock0 -
How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
Anyone has any idea how to block an entire product category, including all the products in that category using the robots.txt file? I'm using woocommerce in wordpress and i'd like to prevent bots from crawling every single one of products urls for now. The confusing part right now is that i have several different url structures linking to every single one of my products for example www.mystore.com/all-products, www.mystore.com/product-category, etc etc. I'm not really sure how i'd type it into the robots.txt file, or where to place the file. any help would be appreciated thanks
On-Page Optimization | | bricerhodes0 -
How do we handle sitemaps in robots.txt when multiple domains point to same physical location?
we have www.mysite.net, www.mysite.se, www.mysite.fi and so on. all of these domains point to the same physical location on our webserver, and we replace texts given back to client depending on which domain he/she requested. My problem is this: How do i configure sitemaps in robots.txt when robots.txt is used by multiple domains? If I for instance put the rows Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapNet.xml
On-Page Optimization | | nordicnetproducts
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapSe.xml in robots.txt, would that result in some cross submission error?0 -
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues. All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Again Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5