Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
-
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions.
I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url.
1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index?
2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today.
Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com
A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them.
http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/
google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now.
original content here
http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/
I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again.
It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question
How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content?
I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music
is that preferable or is this causing me issues?
Any feedback is appreciated.
Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this?
-
Thanks so much for your response.
Honestly I'm still not sure why or what happened.
Essentially the domain has a bit of history. It's been up since 2008 and is very well known authority figure in the niche. The site was taken down by the Govt in their domain seizure crap and held for 13 months. They had to give it back because they had no probable cause, and we were innocent. It's been a big issue in the media, especially when all the SOPA madness was going on but not sure if that 13 month disruption caused any issues for us.
When we came back up we were doing really well, ranking very high and doing about 5k visitors a day from google. We had our highest google traffic day on March 4th and then for some reason we did a massive free fall. Google just left. When I searched site:dajaz1.com it showed paginated pages, category, tags, search pages ranking, it stopped ranking our post pages.
I started going through the site to try and figure out what was wrong. I set everything that's not the home page or the actual post as noindex, follow, we started working on writing more, better titles, better seo urls, removed the pagination plugins etc. We're often the originators of content and sourced as such so it's not necessarily an original content issue.
Google bot came back, but it's still not ranking us like it was and now ranking people above us who link to us, source us, or copy our content. When I check site:dajaz1.com now it's at least pulling posts, but it's pulling posts with numbers in the url, or very old urls. Our newer posts are not ranking. We were getting 5k-8k unique visitors a day organically, now we're getting less than 1000. I'm still at a loss as to why and how to correct.
-
Hi Melissa,
Let me try to answer your question, with the caveat that I'm missing part of the back story. Specifically, it sounds like Google wasn't crawling your site for awhile - any idea why?
If Google is indexing duplicate pages for much of your content, then in all likelihood you won't reach your ranking potential for that content. It sounds like this is because you changed your URL structure, and Google has crawled the new URLs without crawling/de-indexing the old URLs. Does this sound about right?
One solution, and probably your best bet, it to maintain a sitemap of the old URLs. This way, Google is more likely to crawl those URLs, discover the 301 redirect, and de-index those pages much faster. Ideally this is setup before the change in URL structure. At this point, it may be a major pain... if you catch my drift.
(there are a couple ways you could accomplish this, both require a lot of work. You could rewrite the URLs using Excel magic, or write a script to generate an old sitemap. Or you could very briefly switch back to your old url structure, generate a new sitemap to save, and then switch back)
Another method would be to use the URL removal tools in Google Webmaster tools. If your old URLs all used a unique directory structure (that differed from your new directory structure) you can remove entire directories from Google's index with the click of a button.
Regardless, whatever way you choose to remove those URLs, doing so should help improve your rankings.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
This is what I have
The reason I have it set to noindex, follow for category is because it's ranking my category pages over my actual blog posts. I wouldn't have an issue with having the categories indexed, but I do have an issue with posts going no where and my category pages showing up in search results.
I keep getting conflicting information on this so I'm not sure what I should with that.
What concerns me is that it seems to be crawling everything, but it's not dumping the old url structure for the new. I realize that it loses a small amount of link juice on the old urls, but on the newer urls it shouldn't and those are ranking lower than were. I can't figure out for the life of me why.
-
It's known that when you 301 a page, you loose some of the power it once had. That being said, if you're basically 301'ing your whole site, Google will have to reevaluate everything.
For your category pages, add the robots tag and Google will not index them.
if you're using wordpress, here's a quick snippet.
if (is_category()) {
//Allow indexation of category URLs
echo ‘’. “\n”; } elseif (is_404() || is_search() || is_author() || is_archive()) {
//Do not allow indexation and crawling of 404, search, author and archived pages
echo ‘’. “\n”; } else {
//For other URLs, not mentioned above such as post URLs, Page URLs - allow indexation and crawling.
echo ‘’. “\n”; } ?>
-
We are also doing a URL rewrite soon....I am looking forward to seeing responses. It is probably not relevant but I read on here somewhere about making sure you old site map and new site map or on the page for a while until google starts making the connections.
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
-
blog url structure change affect on pagerank
We are looking to change our blog structure which will help us with the organization of the topics but the url structure will change if we do this. Right now all of the blogs are under a general news blog, which we will be breaking out articles into several blog category topics Current:
Technical SEO | | theblueprints
example of current structure
current site: https://domain/blogs/news/blog article name Proposed Change:
current site: https://domain/blogs/keyword-name-of-blog-category/blog article name We have ranked #1 for several keywords that we would like to preserve the ranking if we make this switch with 301 redirects. Looking for suggestion on the percentage of chance our ranking will be negatively affected and by how much? Also what everyones recommendation is if we should make this switch or not touch the urls. Your help is appreciated, thanks in advance.0 -
Site Crawl -> Duplicate Page Content -> Same pages showing up with duplicates that are not
These, for example: | https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_campaign=july15&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=blog | 1 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 200 |
Technical SEO | | writezach
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.145821812.1573134750.1440742418 | 1 | 1 | 25 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=brightpod-article | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=marketplace&utm_campaign=homepage | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=first-3-must-watch-videos | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.159789566.2132270851.1418408142 | 1 | 5 | 31 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_source=vocus&utm_medium=PR&utm_campaign=52release | Any suggestions/directions for fixing or should I just disregard this "High Priority" moz issue? Thank you!0 -
Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?
My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback. The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this. Duplicates /url1.html /url2.html /url3.html /category/product/url.html /category2/product/url.html url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there. _/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well. Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited. I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
Technical SEO | | Essentia
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that: a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'? What's your view on this? Thanks1 -
Should change some pages with key stuffing?
Hello, i have a website with 1 years old and when i started, when i created the pages, theses have key stuffing (20-30-40 same words in meta descriptions and text, sometimes 15, sometimes 20 and sometimes 40). Since i saw this (about 4 months), i change that, doing new pages with 5-10 same keywords. Some pages with many keywords (20-30-40) work very fine and i would not lose the position in google, but i don't want to be penalized for that. Then, my question is: Should change the old pages with key stuffing or let them? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | pompero990 -
Crawl Diagnostics and Duplicate Page Title
SOMOZ crawl our web site and say we have no duplicate page title but Google Webmaster Tool says we have 641 duplicate page titles, Which one is right?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
How do I eliminate duplicate page titles?
Almost...I repeat almost all of my duplicate page titles show up as such because the page is being seen twice in the crawl. How do I prevent this? <colgroup><col width="336"> <col width="438"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | ENSO
| www.ensoplastics.com/ContactUs/ContactUs.html | Contact ENSO Plastics |
| ensoplastics.com/ContactUs/ContactUs.html | Contact ENSO Plastics | This is what is from the CSV...there are many more just like this. How do I cut out all of these duplicate urls?0 -
Duplicate Pages Issue
I noticed a problem and I was wondering if anyone knows how to fix it. I was a sitemap for 1oxygen.com, a site that has around 50 pages. The sitemap generator come back with over a 2000 pages. Here is two of the results: http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/services/rentals.htm
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton
http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/1oxygen/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/oxusportableconcentrator.htm These are actaully pages somehow. In my FTP there in the first /portableconentrators/ folder there is about 12 html documents and no other folders. It looks like it is creating a page for every possible folder combination. I have no idea why you those pages above actually work, help please???0