About duplicate content
-
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website.
Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example,
http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is,
what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag?
Wich url will be consider for main url,
Thanks for yor help.
-
Hi,
I get duplicate content notifications on the following URLs:
and
www.mydomain.nl**/**
The / cause almost all my pages to show up as duplicate content. How to fix these?
Thnxs for the help!
-
I don't think some of the responses in this thread have given you adequate information to solve your problem. 301's and rel canonical are there to solve two very different problems, and when used correctly, can solve a lot of different SEO problems.
In your example you have two URLs which I am going to assume have the exact same information on them. Classic duplicate content situation. Ideally, I think you would want to delete one of these pages and create a 301 to redirect any users and links to the other page. This will focus all your content and links onto a single page and your PR and rankings will rise. I would choose to keep the page that has the better keywords in the URL, and no, it doesn't matter if you have the .html at the end of the URL. With or without, the actual keywords in the URL are more important.
The use of rel="canonical" has a very different purpose. Say for whatever reason you want to keep both of your URL's even though they have the exact same content (testing conversation rates, for example). In this case you would use a rel="canonical" on the page you don't want to rank in the search engines, pointing to the page you do want to rank for.
On http://www.mysite/blue/index.html for example, you would create this tag: <rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite/blue/">eCommerce sites have to do this a lot.</rel="canonical">
Rel canonical should not be used when you're trying to move content from one URL to another. That's what 301s are for.
-
If you are only talking about your home page, then yes setup a 301 redirect as others have shown for the entries already in googles index BUT a redirect itself can lose up to 10% of any link juice flowing to your index page. And if you're building off site links, do you link to your root domain or the specific URL of your homepage? My guess is the root, i.e. www.mysite.com so unless www.mysite.com is actually a different website to whats found at www.mysite.com/blue/ then I always strive to get my sites working without an initial redirect taking place when someone goes to www.mysite.com
Depending on you choice of webserver, you can specify what the default index page should be, in apache this is known as the 'DirectoryIndex'.
If you add the line
DirectoryIndex /blue/index.html
to your .htaccess (or even better apache site config if you can) then apache will serve that page WITHOUT the redirect ensuring any link juice to your route domain is not diluted.
Then just make sure any links on your own site that point to you home page DO NOT point to /blue/ or /blue/index.html but simply to "/" or "http://www.mysite.com/"
-
Hi Perri,
This is an older thread, and people may not see the new response if they're not subscribed to it.
You can certainly redirect the index.html to /. The above thread gives some help, as well as http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/howto/redirect-index-page.htm (though I don't know the age of that post and if it's for a current version of Apache).
I suggest opening a new question here with a title something like "redirecting /index.html to / in apache" and give your details in that question, with a link to the above URL and ask if this is still valid. A link to your site in the question, if you can give it, would also be great.
Thanks!
-
A while back I had asked our hosting company to create 301 redirects in the htacces file for the same issue (www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/products/index.html to www.mysite.com/products/ .....) THe response I received was "redirecting .../index.html to ..../ won’t work. They’re the same page. Apache will get in an infinite loop and the page won’t load. "
Any help would be greatly appreciated since I have 36 instances of this happening on our site.
-
Hi Norberto,
Are you still having duplicate content errors, or did you clear this up? We're happy to help if you're still having any problems, just add a response to this thread.
-
Hi guys thank you so much for your help. I have another think, looking deep in the report i saw a duplicate page title, it is a section like products reviews, for example like this:
Url 1: Title 1 : I like the product - product reviw name of product
Url 2: Title 2 : How can i get the product - product reviw name of product
Why this is condider like a same title page, can somebody help me to clear this doubt.
And what can i do to resolve this problem.
Thanks
-
The only place you would see something in WMT would be DIAGNOSTICS > HTML SUGGESTIONS, and it should show as duplicate title tag and meta description.
WMT wouldn't flag that up specifically because it's not something it really checks for.
-
Thanks for your help guys.
I have another question, why in google websmaster tools i don't recieve any massage error about it?
-
Sorry Saibose, disagree entirely, canonical is a band aid whereas 301 is a fix.
-
Something very similar came up earlier, best to 301 them as E-Dreamz says.
If you put this in your .htaccess file you should have all your pages as www. and the index.html will disappear.
RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Add a rel=canonical tag for the pages that have multiple URLs.
You can see some resources here.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
If you use the rel= canonical tag you will have to do it for all pages with this issue. If the issue is widespread, you can consider a 301, but that wont be very effective for SEO purposes when compared to rel=canonical tag.
-
I would recommend a 301 redirect.
For the best SEO value you want to leave off the /index.html - espcially if that is your homepage.
Don't forget to redirect non-www to www.
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
-
Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us. Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Chris6610 -
Duplicate Content Brainstorming
Hi, New here in the SEO world. Excellent resources here. We have an ecommerce website that sells presentation templates. Today our templates come in 3 flavours - for PowerPoint, for Keynote and both - called Presentation Templates. So we've ended up with 3 URLS with similar content. Same screenshots, similar description.. Example: https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/social-media-keynote-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/social-media-powerpoint-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/presentation-templates/social-media-presentation-template I know what you're thinking. Why not make a website with a template and give 3 download options right? But what about https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/ https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/ These are powerfull URL's in my opinion taking into account that the strongest keyword in our field is "powerpoint templates" How would you solve this "problem" or maybe there is no problem at all.
Technical SEO | | slidescamp0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
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 -
Pages with different content and meta description marked as duplicate content
I am running into an issue where I have pages with completely different body and meta description but they are still being marked as having the same content (Duplicate Page Content error). What am I missing here? Examples: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-to-expect-in-the-summer-internship
Technical SEO | | WallStreetOasis.com
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/something-ventured http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/im-in-the-long-run
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/image/jhjpeg0 -
Press Releases & Duplicate Content
How do you do press releases without duplicating the content? I need to post it on my website along with having it on PR websites. But isn't that considered bad for SEO since it's duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | MercyCollege0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php
Technical SEO | | RouteAccounts0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page
Hello, I am getting Duplicate Content warning from SEOMoz for my home page: http://www.teacherprose.com http://www.teacherprose.com/index html I tried code below in .htaccess: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.teacherprose.com This caused error "too many re-directs" in browser Any thoughts? Thank You, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10