Another deduplication question.
-
Where an existing website has duplicate content issues - specifically the www. and non-www. type; what is the most effective way to inform the searchers and spiders that there is only one page?
I have a site where the ecommerce software (Shopfitter 4) allows a fair bit of meta data to be inserted into each product page but I am uncertain, after a couple of attempts to deduplicate some pages, which is the most effective way to ensure that the www related duplication is eliminated sitewide - there is such a solution.
I have to own up to having looked at
,htaccess
301 redirects
webmaster tools
and become increasingly bamboozled by the conflicting advice as to which is the most effective way or combination to get rid of this problem. too olod to learn new tricks I reckon
Your help and clarification would be appreciated as this may help head off more fruitless work.
-
no. the rewrite rule will apply to all URLs
-
Quick tip:
Usually you can just contact your Hosting company and ask them to do the 301 redirect for you if you feel uneasy tampering with code on the server.
/ G
-
BTW, my answer is for a Apache server.... This means don't use it if its Microsoft...
-
Hi again!
Here we go:
Just input following to .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L](replace example withyour site )
This should do the trick for the whole site.
/ Gustav
-
Blimey gustav - that was quick. In the htaccess do you need to specify each separtae page url or is there a way of setting it site wide?
Many thanks for taking the time to answer.
Ray
-
Hi there!
Use An 301 redirect you can do this in hte .htaccess file.
Submit xml sitemap to Google webmaster tools with the correct adress(with www)
You will soon be rid of the duplicated pages if you do this.
Best
/ Gustav
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
-
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Duplicate content question
Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
Real Estate Site Question
I'm working on this site: www.aldodavico.com - who is a real estate agent in Miami. Any ideas/best practices for SEO for a site like this one? It's got about 500 pages. I've never deal with such a huge site before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Canonical Tag - Question
Hey, I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly. The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine. My questions are: Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com? Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys... If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Advanced Question on Synonym Variation Pages!
Hi, This is quite an advanced question, so I'll go through in detail - please bare with me! I launched the new version of our website exactly a week ago - and all the key metrics are in the right direction: Pages / Visit +5% , Time on Site +25%, Bounce rate down 1 %. I work in an industry were our primary keyword has 4 synonyms and our long tail keywords are location related. So as an example I have primary synonyms like: Holiday, Vacation, Break, Trip (Not actually these but they are good enough as an example). Pluralised versions and you have 8 in total. So my longtail keywords are like: Las Vegas Vacation / Las Vegas Vacations
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
Las Vegas Holiday / Las Vegas Holidays
Las Vegas Trip / Las Vegas Trips
Las Vegas Breaks / Las vegas Breaks All these synonyms effectively mean the same thing, so my thinking on my new website was to specifically target each of these synonyms with their own unique page and optimise the meta and page titles, to those exact words. To make these pages truely unique, I therefore got a bunch of copywriters to write about 600 words unique for every long tail synonym (well over 750,000 words in total!). So now at this point I have my page "Las Vegas Holidays" with 600 unique words of content, and "Las Vegas Vactions" with 600 words of unique content etc etc etc. The problem is, when the user is searching for these words, there primary goal is not to read 600 words of content on "Las Vegas Holidays" - their primary goal is to get a list of last vegas holidays that they can search, view purchase (they may want to read 600 words of content, but is not their primary goal). So this puts me in a dilema - I need to display the nuts and bolt (IE the actual holidays in las vegas) to the customer on any page they land on off my synonyms as the primary content. But to make sure these pages are unique I need to also have this unique content on that page. So here's what I did: On every synonym version of the page I display the exact same information. However, on each page I have a "Information" link. and on click this pop's up a layer which contains my unique content for that page. To further optimise using perfect anchors in this content pop-up, I have cross linked the synonym pages (totally naturally) - IE on my "Las Vegas Holidays" page, in the content I may have the words "Las Vegas Breaks" - this would be linked the the "Las Vegas Breaks" synonym page. In theory I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am doing in the eyes of the customer - but I have a big concern that this may well look "fishy" to SE's. IE the pages are almost identical to the user except for this information pop-up layer of unique content, titles and meta. We know that Google at least can get can tell exactly what the user see's when they land on that page ( from their "Preview") and can distinguise between user visible and hidden text. Therefore, even though from a user experience, I think we are making a page that is perfect for them (they get the list of vactions etc as the primary content, and can read infomation if they want by clicking a button), I am concerned that SE's are going to say - hold on a minute there are load of pages here that are identical except for a chuck of text that is not visible to the user (Even though this is visible to the user if they click the "Information" button), and this content cross links to a load of almost identical pages with the same thing. Today I checked our rankings, and we have taken a fair whack from google - I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I expected big fluctuations from ranking for the first few weeks - but I'd be a lot more confident if they were fluctuating in the right direction!! So what do I do?
As far as I can see my options break down as follows: Content Display:
1/. Keep it as it is, and hope the SE's don't see it as spammy. Even though I think what we are doing is the best for customer experience, I'm concerned SE's won't. 2/. On every synonym page, below all the list of products, packages etc that the customer wants to see, display the unique content as a block of subtext text which is visble by default. This however could make the page a bit ugly. 3/. Display a visible snippet of the unique content, below all the packages, and have a more button which expands the rest of the content - IE have a part visible layer. This is slightly better for display, but again I'm only displaying a portion of visible content and the rest will still be flagged as "hidden" by default to the SE's. Cross Linking within the content:
1/. Keep it as it is where synonym keywords link to the synonym version of the page. 2/. Alter it so that every sysnonym keyword links to the "primary" synonym version of the page - EG if I now "Las Vegas Holidays" is my main keyword, then "Las Vegas Vactions" keyword, would not link to my "Las Vegas Vactions" page as current, but would link to my "Las Vegas Holidays" page. I apologise for the indepth questions, but it requires a lot of explanation to get it across clearly. I would be grateful on any of your thoughts. Many thanks in advance.0