SEOMoz Internal Dupe. Content & Possible Coding Issues
-
SEOmoz Community!
I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped...
First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point.
Now, the issues I am having:
- I have two sites: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx
A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments).
I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages:
-
Car Financing How It Works
-
A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit
(Please let me know if you could use more examples)
At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords.
All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not!
I could really use some significant help here...
- Both of our sites have a number of access points:
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such.
However, my sites can also be reached via the following:
http://www.federalautoloan.com
http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com
http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx
Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags?
I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details.
Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it!
-
Hey Cyrus,
Thank you very much for the detailed response!
-
Hi Colt,
Looks to me like you're getting a duplicate content errors because your page templates are so large, they are tripping the SEOmoz duplicate content filter, which goes off if more than 95% of your code is similar between 2 pages.
For example, take a look at these 2 URLs.
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Why-Shopping-for-an-Auto-Loan-is-Good.aspx
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Regarding-Dealer-Financing.aspx
With the gazillions of links at the bottom of the two pages, the pages have 98% similar code. (You can check it out yourself with this duplicate content tool) The good news is the TEXT content similarity is less than 40%.
1. Google is more sophisticated than Moz, but it would be a good idea to remove some of those links and put them into categories. If you could get these 100 or so links down to 20, that would be closer to ideal
2. Just a recommendation > most of your text is in a scroll box. I'd reformat your page so that all the text was visible without the box. Not sure if this is hurting you or not, but it seems contrary to best user experience, so I'd be inclined to think Google doesn't look to favorably on it.
3. Noticed you blocked a lot of files in your robots.txt, including your css. Unless you have a very specific reason for keeping Google out of these files, I'd let them crawl as Google uses CSS to render your page to see what content is above and below the fold.
4. Best practices is to redirect non-www to www versions of your site (or vice versa). If you can't do this, a canonical tag will do just as well. But how about redirecting everything WITHOUT the /index.aspx? That would look cleaner in search results.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hello Colt.
You have the joys of a Microsoft webserver.
That means all of these URLs work - and many more:
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CRedit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREdit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREDit.aspx
It does exactly the same thing if you remove the www.
- duplicate content issues.
Also, if you do this:
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspxZ
- you return a 200 response code and serve up the front page
I didn't find a way to make your server give me a 404
-
As an aside: please feel free to extend any other SEO suggestions you may have my way! I am doing my best to learn the SEO trade... and ANY advice is appreciated.
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
-
Possible issues with 301 redirecting to a new domain name
Ive got a current domain and after a bit of a rebrand Im considering 301 rediecting the current site to a newly purchased domain. Id redirect each age to idential pages. Am I likely to see any issues. I know this is the recomended way from Google but just wondering how smoothly it works and whether Im likely to see any ranking drops or other problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulfoz16090 -
Is AMP works on blogs only?
I have installed AMP Plugin in my WordPress website but when I check pages with /amp/ it shows 404 error. But for blog pages, for the example www.website.com/blog/post/amp/ it shows amp version of the particular page. Also, nothing is showing in search console Accelerate Moile pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Stephanie0 -
What is considered duplicate content?
Hi, We are working on a product page for bespoke camper vans: http://www.broadlane.co.uk/campervans/vw-campers/bespoke-campers . At the moment there is only one page but we are planning add similar pages for other brands of camper vans. Each page will receive its specifically targeted content however the 'Model choice' cart at the bottom (giving you the choice to select the internal structure of the van) will remain the same across all pages. Will this be considered as duplicate content? And if this is a case, what would be the ideal solution to limit penalty risk: A rel canonical tag seems wrong for this, as there is no original item as such. Would an iFrame around the 'model choice' enable us to isolate the content from being indexed at the same time than the page? Thanks, Celine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
Robots.txt issue for international websites
In Google.co.uk, our US based (abcd.com) is showing: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more But UK website (uk.abcd.com) is working properly. We would like to disappear .com result totally, if possible. How to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JinnatUlHasan0 -
Internal structure update
How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Indexing issue?
Hey guys when I do a search of site:thetechblock.com query in Google I don't seem to see any recent posts (nothing for August). In Google webmaster I see that the site is being crawled (I think), but I'm not sure. I also see the the sitemaps are being indexed but again it just seems really odd that I'm not seeing these in Google results. SEO seems all good too with SEO Moz. Is there something I'm not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Removed Internal Rel=NoFollows from power internal page - how long till reflected in Google?
I just started with a client, who has an internal page (not the homepage) that gets about 70% of all total links to the site and ranks #1 for a highly competitive keyword. For some reason, the first set of links, including the first anchor text link to the homepage are nofollowed. I removed the nofollows yesterday. Today, The internal page has already been reindexed in Google showing the followed anchor text link to the homepage Should I expect a jump in link juice pointing to my homepage immediately with a corresponding rankings boost? Homepage is #8 for target term. I hope this makes sense. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattAaron0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0