Resurrecting a heavily duplicated Joomla website.
-
The site in question is stanwix.info.
I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo. It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz.
Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast.
As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly.
OR
do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project. I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time.
The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with.
Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.
-
Here are my suggestions
- While upgrading software is typically a good thing, it sounds like you're possibly going to break things by doing it (I would assume we're talking major version changes, not patch levels). I would make sure of what you're going to break before doing it. At least make a test copy somewhere and monkey with it there. NEVER "tinker" with your live site.
- There are scripts that can export Joomla sites. If you do switch software, be meticulous in your 301s or take a ranking bath.
- Canonical your site. That will fix the duplicate problem easily.
- Why Wordpress? Consider a forum instead. A forum invites conversation and natively creates fresh content.
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 Title Tag
We are getting a Duplicate Title Tag error on our pages but we have different titles and the differences are being seen by Google. We are using the code <%@ Page Title="School Lunch Software Pricing || EZ School Apps"%> Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | EZParentCenter0 -
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Removel of duplicate contant
Do to the WordPress programming I'm having a lot of duplicates that I will remove soon. What is the best way to make a decision which ones to keep and which ones to remove?
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Why is there duplicates of my domain
When viewing crawl diagnostics in SEOmoz I can see both "www.website.com" and a truncated version "website.com" is this normal and why is it showing (I do not have duplicates of my site on the server)? E.g.: http://www.klinehimalaya.com/
Technical SEO | | gorillakid
http://klinehimalaya.com/0 -
Duplicate Content For Trailing Slashes?
I have several website in campaigns and I consistently get flagged for duplicate content and duplicate page titles from the domain and the domain/ versions of the sites even though they are properly redirected. How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
Duplicate Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0 -
Duplicate Content Resolution Suggestion?
SEOmoz tools is saying there is duplicate content for: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/index.html What would be the best way to resolve this "error"?
Technical SEO | | PlasticCards0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0