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
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 outdatedAlso, 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,
-
Hi there
It sounds like you've got all the basis covered. To avoid any form of duplication, it is important to redirect the old version to the new URL as soon as possible, preferably simultaneously when the new blog is published. That will ensure the two won't be indexed together, plus it makes sense that an updated would be redirected.
There are other methods as well - you could simply remove the old blog post page and return a 404 (which isn't a bad thing), update the canonicals like you say or add a robots instruction to prevent the page from being indexed. But I think a 301 redirect here would be best, as it would pass on any link equity (no matter how small) the previous page did earn, it's one of the quickest methods to remove old pages from the Google index and for continuity's sake I think it makes sense too.
The fact that you're changing the old post in a substantial way might mean that you could potentially keep both versions on your site, but only you'll be the judge of how unique it is. I think, to remove any doubt, you should use the 301.
Hope this 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
-
Best Way to Handle Near-Duplicate Content?
Hello Dear MOZers, Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem. Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar. As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course. Add 150+ more words to each description text block Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page Any other options or suggestions? Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages. Thank you folks, Ethan
Technical SEO | | BernsteinMedicalNYC0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin <cite>dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/</cite><a id="srsl_0" class="pplsrsla" tabindex="0" data-ved="0CEQQ5hkwAA" data-url="http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/" data-title="Roller Banners Cheap » admin" data-sli="srsl_0" data-ci="srslc_0" data-vli="srslcl_0" data-slg="webres"></a>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google.Please can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Tired of finding solution for duplicate contents.
Just my site was scanned by seomoz and seen lots of duplicate content and titles found. Well I am tired of finding solutions of duplicate content for a shopping site product category page. You can see the screenshot below. http://i.imgur.com/TXPretv.png You can see below in every link its showing "items_per_page=64, 128 etc.". This happened in every category in which I was created. I am already using Canonical add-on to avoid this problem but still it's there. You can check my domain here - http://www.plugnbuy.com/computer-software/pc-security/antivirus-internet-security/ and see if the add-on working correct. I recently submitted my sitemap to GWT, so that's why it's not showing me any report regarding duplicate issues. Please help ME
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
"Daily Special" = Duplicate Content?
I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient: We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure: www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html. We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended: www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html ** Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RScime250 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Query string in url - duplicate content?
Hi everyone I would appreciate some advice on the following. I have a page which has some nice content on but it also has a search functionality. When a search is run a querystrong is run. So i will get something like mypage.php?id=20 etc. With many different url potentials, will each query string be seen as a different page? If so i don't want duplicate content. So am i best putting canonical tags in the head tags on mypage.php ? to avoid Google seeing potential duplicate content. Many thanks for all your advice.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Duplicate homepage content
Hi, I recently did a site crawl using seomoz crawl test My homepage seems to have 3 cases of duplicate content.. These are the urls www.example.ie/ www.example..ie/%5B%7E19%7E%5D www.example..ie/index.htm Does anyone have any advise on this? What impact does this have on my seo?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0