Duplicate Content Question
-
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique.
Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently?
I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue?
Thanks
Brian Clapp
-
You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page:
In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical
Hope this helps
-
its pretty awesome. Welcome
-
less than 24 hours into my seomoz pro membership and I'm already blown away - thanks for all of your assistance. Christine it appears I don't have a .htaccess file so I will follow what you wrote and create a new blank file with just that code in it...
you guys rock. I've got lots more learning to do....
Brian
-
Something that was challenging for me at first was finding .htaccess file. It should be in the root directory of where all of you website files are stored. It may be hidden or you may need to create one. If its hidden, find out how to un-hide files in your specific FTP program. If you need to create it, simply create a blank file with the name .htaccess and paste the recommendation that Ryan made.
-
Ryan thanks for your great advice. I'm the site founder but by no means a tech expert... I'm more the content guy, but I'm learning. I
understand what you have written...all except the part of where I put that code. Where do I find my .htaccess file?
-
Thank you for your great response Dave! I'm the founder of the site, but my background is more in content and I'm learning the SEO as I go, so forgive me if this is a silly follow up.
In reference to response #4 - my original designer said canonical was only on the home page, but your response sounds like it should be on every page? If so do I put the whole url for that page, or just the root? Again not an expert here so all this advice really helps me learn.
Thanks
Brian
-
- In addition to your 301 redirect issue Ryan mentioned you are internally linking to the non www version for your logo link: (this leaks juice on the redirect as well if you are going for the www version)
2 ) You really want to choose one version and go with it everywhere (be precise down to the trailing slash) - Google webmaster tools has a setting for this as well - sign up and choose your preferred setting / then save if you haven't already
-
Make the changes and check Open Site Explorer for both versions to see your links that appear the non-preferred way and see if you can contact your external linking sources to fix the issue to the preferred URL
-
I didn't see any canonical for the other pages (other than the home page) add those as well
-
Rerun OSE after your next crawl completes or use Xenu for immediate testing for the internal links - external may take a bit longer.
-
This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/
The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect adoptionhelp.org to www.adoptionhelp.org
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.adoptionhelp.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adoptionhelp.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.
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
-
Woocommerce Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hi, I'm receiving a duplicate content error. It says that this url: https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41 is a duplicate of this: http://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum I'm using wordpress, woocommerce, and not really sure how to even address this. I tried adding this to .htaccess but it didn't redirect the url: 301 Redirects Redirect 301 https://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=41 http://kidsinministry.org/childrens-ministry-curriculum/ Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | a_toohill0 -
Do you think my client is being hit for duplicate content?
Wordpress website. The client's website is http://www.denenapoints.com/ The URL that we purchase so that we could setup the hosting account is http://houston-injury-lawyers.com, which shows 1 page indexed in Google when I search for site:http://houston-injury-lawyers.com On http://www.denenapoints.com/ there is <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/"> But on http://houston-injury-lawyers.com it says the same thing, <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/" /> Is this how it should be setup, assuming that we want everything to point to http://denenapoints.com/? Maybe we should do a 301 redirect to be 100% Sure? Hopefully I explained this well enough. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts, thanks!
Technical SEO | | georgetsn0 -
Duplicate content or Duplicate page issue?
Hey Moz Community! I have a strange case in front of me. I have published a press release on my client's website and it ranked right away in Google. A week after the page completely dropped and it completely disappeared. The page is being indexed in Google, but when I search "title of the PR", the only results I get for that search query are the media and news outlets that have reported the news. No presence of my client's page. I also have to mention that I found two URLs of the same page: one with lower case letters and one with capital letters. Is this a duplicate page or a duplicate content issue coming from the news websites? How can I solve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Workaholic0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
Duplicate Page content / Rel=Cannonical
My SEO Moz crawl is showing duplicate content on my site. What is showing up are two articles I submitted to Submit your article (article submission service). I put their code in to my pages i.e. " <noscript><b>This article will only display in JavaScript enabled browsers.</b></noscript> " So do I need to delete these blog posts since they are showing up as dup content? I am having a difficult time understanding rel=cannonical. Isn't this for dup content on within one site? So I could not use rel="cannonical" in this instance? What is the best way to feature an article or press release written for another site, but that you want your clients to see? Rewritting seem ridiculous for a small business like ours. Can we just present the link? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Hiding Duplicate Content using Javascript
We have e-commerce site selling books. Besides basic information on books, we have content for “About the book” , “Editorial Reviews”, “About the author” etc. But the content in all these section are duplicate and are available on all sites selling similar books. Our question is: 1.Should we worry about the content being duplicate?2.If yes, then will it by a good idea to hide this duplicate content using javascript or iframe?
Technical SEO | | CyrilWilson0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0