Duplicate content and http and https
-
Within my Moz crawl report, I have a ton of duplicate content caused by identical pages due to identical pages of http and https URL's.
For example:
http://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations
https://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations
The strange thing is that 99% of these URL's are not sensitive in nature and do not require any security features. No credit card information, booking, or carts. The web developer cannot explain where these extra URL's came from or provide any further information.
Advice or suggestions are welcome! How do I solve this issue?
THANKS MOZZERS
-
Hard to tell without knowing the site, but it's possible there are external links to "https" versions of the pages. At this point, Google is going to increase the pressure to secure sites, and later this year Chrome will start warning users about all non-secure pages, so it may be worth making the move.
-
I'm reading this response and this is happening on my site as well. How did this happen in the first place? I have duplicate content because of https and http copies of all my web pages. If I type https://www.mywebsite.com I can't get to my site. Could this be coming from my hosting company? I've set up my site to simply be http://www.mywebsite.com. I'm a little worried to change my robots.txt and I would love to know how this happened in the first place.
-
If Google detects both http: and https: versions, they've started to automatically pick the https: version, but that's not consistent yet. In general, I think it's still important to set strong canonicalization signals. Google still separates your http: and https: sites in Google Search Console, too, so even they haven't quite made up their minds.
In general, Google is pushing sites toward https:, but that's a somewhat complex decision that depends on more than just SEO. If you're using https: and the https: URLs are indexed, then you should treat those as canonical and suppress the http: URLs, in most cases.
-
Hate to respond to a 3 year old thread. But does this solution needs to be updated?
Is there any change in response now, as Google is favoring https for most pages. Does google still consider http and https as two different sites? If so which one should be suppressed - http or https?
Aji
-
Hi,
I'm still having problems with redirecting. I only have 1 duplicate page with https and http, that I want to redirect but it's the homepage.
i want to redirect: https://www.domain.com to http://www.domain.com
But keep the rest of the pages the same (half http and the other half https).
How do i do this?
-
Anytime Rand! I only have two simple rules:
1. Talking business on ski days is not allowed
2. Entry into Vermont requires a pound of Seattle's best french roast coffee. In return, you receive some fantastic Vermont maple syrup.
Simple rules to live by LOL
Thanks again for all of your help...
Peter
-
Thanks dude! If I make it to Vermont, I might look you up
-
Thanks James..
Sorry, I was using Big Company as an example and just being generic.
The real URL if interested is www.hawkresort.com
-
I would personally like to thank everyone that responded with an answer. Man O Man, the best part of belonging to SEOMOZ is the community forum. It's incredibly valuable, being able to ask a question and reach out to such talent as all of you.
If anyone ever gets up to Killington or Okemo skiing, the beer is on me! I live right between both ski areas, about 8 miles to either mountain..
Thanks again.
-
I think Harald and James covered the bases here, but a couple of comments on Harald's reply:
(1) Definitely check this. A common cause of indexed https: pages is that a secure section of your site is being crawled (like a shopping cart), and you're using relative navigation links (like ) - when a crawler or visitor hits the nav link from a secure page, the relative link grabs the https: In most cases, you may want to NOINDEX secure pages. Shopping carts and checkout pages have no business in the search index, IMO.
[(2)-(5) I believe this does work, but it's very tricky, so please be careful. If anyone has linked to the https: pages, you'll lose the link-juice this way (you'll just cut those pages off). I honestly don't think it's a good choice for most sites.
(8) I actually believe the 301-redirect is simpler in most cases.
As James said, sitewide canonical tags (or on the affect pages, if they're isolated) will also work.](/contact.php)
-
Hi Serge, I came to know about the "robots_ssl.txt" from the website http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/robots-and-https.html
-
I would check your server for a https folder.
add a robots.txt file in the root of the https folder:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/My guess is that the spider is following a link somewhere within your site that links to a https:// url. The spider is than re-indexing the entire site using https://
My 2 cents for what its worth.
-
Harald, " robots_ssl.txt " where did you get that?
-
Hello Hawkvt1, Fisrt of all I want to tell you that the protocols (http/https) are different, they are considered two separate sites, so there’s a good chance to get penalized for duplicate content. If the search engine discovers two identical pages, generally it would take the page it saw first and ignore the other pages.The solutions are described below:
S__olutions:
- Be smart about the site structure: to keep the engines from crawling and indexing HTTPS pages, structure the website so that HTTPs are only accessible through a form submission (log-in, sign-up, or payment pages). The common mistake is making these pages available via a standard link (happens when you are either ignorant or not aware that the secure version of the site is being crawled and indexed).
- Use Robots.txt file to control which pages will be crawled and indexed
- Use.htaccess file. Here’s how to do this:
- Create a file names robots_ssl.txt in your root.
- Add the following code to your .htaccessRewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443 [NC]RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt [L]
- Remove yourdomain.com:443 from the webmaster tools if the pages have already been crawled
- For dynamic pages like php, try< ?phpif ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == 443){echo “< meta name=” robots ” content=” noindex,nofollow ” > “;}?>
- Dramatic solution (may not always be possible): 301 redirect the HTTPS pages to the HTTP pages – with hopes that the link juice will transfer over.
For more information please refer to this link :
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https
I'm sure that your problem is solved.
-
You could implement the canonical tag onto the HTTP version of the website.
Another problem when having a quick look at this website is that all your title tags are the same with the brand term at the front, this is not advisable at all you want to put the brand term at the end of the title and your generic terms first.
I would look at getting an SEO audit done to fix the issues with the website.
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 when working with makes and models?
Okay, so I am running a store on Shopify at the address https://www.rhinox-group.com. This store is reasonably new, so being updated constantly! The thing that is really annoying me at the moment though, is I am getting errors in the form of duplicate content. This seems to be because we work using the machine make and model, which is obviously imperative, but then we have various products for each machine make and model. Have we got any suggestions on how I can cut down on these errors, as the last thing I want is being penalised by Google for this! Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | josh.sprakes1 -
Is this going to be seen by google as duplicate content
Hi All, Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer in regards to this. I have been conducted a bit of analysis of our server access file to see what googlebot is doing, where it is going etc. Now firstly, I am not SEO but have an interest. What I am seeing a lot of is that we have URL's that have an extension that sets the currency that is displayed on the products so that we can conduct Adwords campaigns in other countries, these show as follows: feedurl=AUD, feedurl=USD, feedurl=EUR etc. What I can see is that google bot is hitting a URL such as /some_product, then /someproduct?feedurl=USD and then /someproduct?feedurl=EUR and then /someproduct?feedurl=AUD all after each other. Now this is the same product page and just has the price shown slightly different on each. Would this count as a duplicate content issue? Should I disavow feedurl? Any assistance that you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Hreflang and possible duplicate content SEO issue
| 0 <a class="vote-down-off" title="This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful">down vote</a> favorite | Hey community, my first question here 🙂 Imagine there is a page with video, it has hreflang tags setup, to lead let's say German visitors to /de/ folder... So, on that German version of page, everything like menus, navigation and such are in German, but the video is the same, the title of the video (H1 tag) is the same, <title></code></strong> and <strong><code>meta description</code></strong> is the same as on the original English page. It means that general (English) page and German version of it has the same key content in English.</p> <p>To me it seems to be a SEO duplicate content issue. As I know, Google doesn't think that content is duplicate, if it is properly translated to other language.</p> <p>Does my explained case mean that the content will be detected by Google as duplicate?</p> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Technical SEO | | poiseo0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?
Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages. Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Avoiding duplicate content/same pages
hi I have been checking through all the Q and A but i i'm still not sure how you get http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html to be just http://www.domain.co.uk/? Do you add canonical to the index page to point to the page you prefer and then add a 301 redirect? thanks
Technical SEO | | challen0