Duplicate content across multiple domains
-
I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain.
My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages.
I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older. Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen?
Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site.
I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages.
Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
-
I went ahead and added the links to the sitemap, however when google crawled the links I receieve this message.
When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL.
However I do not understand how adding the redirected links to the sitemap will remove the old links.
-
Worth a shot. Crawl bots usually work by following links from page to the next. If links links no longer exist to those pages, then Google will have a tough time finding those pages and de-indexing them in favor or the correct pages.
Good luck!
-
One of the previous developers left a hole that caused this issue. The system shares code between sites.
-
Andrew,
The links were removed from the offending sites, but If I understand the gist of your suggestion Google won't remove them as quickly if they are no longer linked and yes I am using canonical tags. So I should create a sitemap with the previous links and once Google follows these links to the main site remove the sitemap. Is that your recommendation?
I suppose I can try this first before filing a request to remove the entire site.
-
Ah, I thought he was saying the dupe content does still exists but no more duplication is taking place after the fix. That's where I was going wrong then lol.
-
As long as the duplicate content pages no longer exist and you've set up the 301 redirects properly, this shouldn't be a long term problem. It can sometimes take Google a while to crawl through 1000's of pages to index the correct pages. You might want to include these pages in a Sitemap to speed up the process, particularly if there are no longer any links to these pages from anywhere else. Are you using canonical tags? They might also help point Google in the right direction.
I don't think a no cache meta tag would help. This is assuming the page will be crawled and by that point Google should follow the 301 and cace that page.
Hope this helps! Let me know how the situation progresses.
Andrew
-
Do you want the smaller sites to still exist? If they don't matter at all then you could always take them offline though that's not recommended for obvious reasons (but it would get them out of the index fairly quick).
If they still need to exist then we're just back to the same thing, changing the content on them. If the problem has been fixed to stop further duplication then that's fine... you could limit the damage by having all of those smaller sites be dupes of each other but not of the main site by rewriting the smaller ones with one lot of content, or the main one. At least that way they will only be competing with each other and not the main site any more.
Or have I still got the wrong end of the stick?
-
I am referring to an e-commerce site, so yes its dynamic. The hole has been plugged (so to speak) but the content still exists in the google cache.
-
Ah I see, so it's a CMS which pumps out content then?
But it pumps it to other sites?
-
Steve, Maybe I haven't explained the issue in enough detail. The duplicate content issue is related to a technical issue with the site causing the content to be duplicated when it should not have been. Its not a matter of rewriting content. My issue deals with purging this content from these other domains so that the main domain can be indexed with this content.
-
You could always just rewrite the content so it's not duplicate, that way you get to keep them cached and maybe focus on some different but still targeted long tail traffic... turn a negative into a positive. I accept thousands of pages is a lot of work, but there's a million and one online copywriters who are pretty good (and cheap) that you could assign projects to for it. Google copywriters for hire or freelance copywriters... could have it done in no time and not spend that much
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
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
How to handle one section of duplicate content
Hi guys, i'm wondering if I can get some best practice advice in preparation for launching our new e-commerce website. For the new website we are creating location pages with a description and things to do which will lead the user to hotels in the location. For each hotel page which relates to the location we will have the same 'Things to do' content. This is what the content will look like on each page: Location page Location title (1-3 words) Location description (150-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) Reasons to visit location (15 words) Hotel page Hotel name and address (10 words) Short description (25 words) Reasons to book hotel (15 words) Hotel description (100-200 words) Friendly message why to visit (15 words) Hotel reviews feed from trust pilot Types of break and information (100-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) My question is how much will we penalised for having the same 'Things to do' content on say up to 10 hotels + 1 location page? In an ideal world we want to develop a piece of code which tells search engines that the original content lies on the location page but this will not be possible before we go live. I'm unsure whether we should just go and take the potential loss in traffic or remove the 'Things to do' section on hotel pages until we develop the piece of code?
Technical SEO | | CHGLTD1 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Duplicate content in product listing
We have "duplicate content" warning in our moz report which mostly revolve around our product listing (eCommerce site) where various filters return 0 results (and hence show the same content on the page). Do you think those need to be addressed, and if so how would you prevent product listing filters that appearing as duplicate content pages? should we use rel=canonical or actually change the content on the page?
Technical SEO | | erangalp0 -
Multiple domains on the same hosting
Hello, I have around 80 sites (different domains) which are on the same host. Everytime I look up the IP of these domains, it gives me the same IP. The sites are interlinked, all linking to the main domain. My question is: Does the off site link building have effect on the 80 sites?
Technical SEO | | Arianittt0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0