About duplicate content
-
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website.
Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example,
http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is,
what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag?
Wich url will be consider for main url,
Thanks for yor help.
-
Hi,
I get duplicate content notifications on the following URLs:
and
www.mydomain.nl**/**
The / cause almost all my pages to show up as duplicate content. How to fix these?
Thnxs for the help!
-
I don't think some of the responses in this thread have given you adequate information to solve your problem. 301's and rel canonical are there to solve two very different problems, and when used correctly, can solve a lot of different SEO problems.
In your example you have two URLs which I am going to assume have the exact same information on them. Classic duplicate content situation. Ideally, I think you would want to delete one of these pages and create a 301 to redirect any users and links to the other page. This will focus all your content and links onto a single page and your PR and rankings will rise. I would choose to keep the page that has the better keywords in the URL, and no, it doesn't matter if you have the .html at the end of the URL. With or without, the actual keywords in the URL are more important.
The use of rel="canonical" has a very different purpose. Say for whatever reason you want to keep both of your URL's even though they have the exact same content (testing conversation rates, for example). In this case you would use a rel="canonical" on the page you don't want to rank in the search engines, pointing to the page you do want to rank for.
On http://www.mysite/blue/index.html for example, you would create this tag: <rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite/blue/">eCommerce sites have to do this a lot.</rel="canonical">
Rel canonical should not be used when you're trying to move content from one URL to another. That's what 301s are for.
-
If you are only talking about your home page, then yes setup a 301 redirect as others have shown for the entries already in googles index BUT a redirect itself can lose up to 10% of any link juice flowing to your index page. And if you're building off site links, do you link to your root domain or the specific URL of your homepage? My guess is the root, i.e. www.mysite.com so unless www.mysite.com is actually a different website to whats found at www.mysite.com/blue/ then I always strive to get my sites working without an initial redirect taking place when someone goes to www.mysite.com
Depending on you choice of webserver, you can specify what the default index page should be, in apache this is known as the 'DirectoryIndex'.
If you add the line
DirectoryIndex /blue/index.html
to your .htaccess (or even better apache site config if you can) then apache will serve that page WITHOUT the redirect ensuring any link juice to your route domain is not diluted.
Then just make sure any links on your own site that point to you home page DO NOT point to /blue/ or /blue/index.html but simply to "/" or "http://www.mysite.com/"
-
Hi Perri,
This is an older thread, and people may not see the new response if they're not subscribed to it.
You can certainly redirect the index.html to /. The above thread gives some help, as well as http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/howto/redirect-index-page.htm (though I don't know the age of that post and if it's for a current version of Apache).
I suggest opening a new question here with a title something like "redirecting /index.html to / in apache" and give your details in that question, with a link to the above URL and ask if this is still valid. A link to your site in the question, if you can give it, would also be great.
Thanks!
-
A while back I had asked our hosting company to create 301 redirects in the htacces file for the same issue (www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/products/index.html to www.mysite.com/products/ .....) THe response I received was "redirecting .../index.html to ..../ won’t work. They’re the same page. Apache will get in an infinite loop and the page won’t load. "
Any help would be greatly appreciated since I have 36 instances of this happening on our site.
-
Hi Norberto,
Are you still having duplicate content errors, or did you clear this up? We're happy to help if you're still having any problems, just add a response to this thread.
-
Hi guys thank you so much for your help. I have another think, looking deep in the report i saw a duplicate page title, it is a section like products reviews, for example like this:
Url 1: Title 1 : I like the product - product reviw name of product
Url 2: Title 2 : How can i get the product - product reviw name of product
Why this is condider like a same title page, can somebody help me to clear this doubt.
And what can i do to resolve this problem.
Thanks
-
The only place you would see something in WMT would be DIAGNOSTICS > HTML SUGGESTIONS, and it should show as duplicate title tag and meta description.
WMT wouldn't flag that up specifically because it's not something it really checks for.
-
Thanks for your help guys.
I have another question, why in google websmaster tools i don't recieve any massage error about it?
-
Sorry Saibose, disagree entirely, canonical is a band aid whereas 301 is a fix.
-
Something very similar came up earlier, best to 301 them as E-Dreamz says.
If you put this in your .htaccess file you should have all your pages as www. and the index.html will disappear.
RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Add a rel=canonical tag for the pages that have multiple URLs.
You can see some resources here.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
If you use the rel= canonical tag you will have to do it for all pages with this issue. If the issue is widespread, you can consider a 301, but that wont be very effective for SEO purposes when compared to rel=canonical tag.
-
I would recommend a 301 redirect.
For the best SEO value you want to leave off the /index.html - espcially if that is your homepage.
Don't forget to redirect non-www to www.
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
-
Despite canonical duplicate content in WMT
Hi, 2 weeks ago we've made big changes in title and meta descriptions. To solve the missing title and descriptions. Also set the right canonical. Now i see that in WMT despite the canonical it shows duplicates in meta descriptions and titles. i've setup the canonical like this:
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
1. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname
2. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname-more-info The canonical on both pages is like this: I'm aware of creating duplicate titles and descriptions, caused by the cms we use and also caused by wrong structure of category/products (we'll solve that nest year) that's why i wanted the canonical, but now it's not going any better, did i do something wrong with the canonical?0 -
How to deal with 80 websites and duplicated content
Consider the following: A client of ours has a Job boards website. They then have 80 domains all in different job sectors. They pull in the jobs based on the sectors they were tagged in on the back end. Everything is identical across these websites apart from the brand name and some content. whats the best way to deal with this?
Technical SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Duplicate Content on 2 Sites - Advice
We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich
Technical SEO | | SEOLeaders0 -
404's and duplicate content.
I have real estate based websites that add new pages when new listings are added to the market and then deletes pages when the property is sold. My concern is that there are a significant amount of 404's created and the listing pages that are added are going to be the same as others in my market who use the same IDX provider. I can go with a different IDX provider that uses IFrame which doesn't create new pages but I used a IFrame before and my time on site was 3min w/ 2.5 pgs per visit and now it's 7.5 pg/visit with 6+min on the site. The new pages create new content daily so is fresh content and better on site metrics (with the 404's) better or less 404's, no dup content and shorter onsite metrics better? Any thoughts on this issue? Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
How much to change to avoid duplicate content?
Working on a site for a dentist. They have a long list of services that they want us to flesh out with text. They provided a bullet list of services, we're trying to get 1 to 2 paragraphs of text for each. Obviously, we're not going to write this off the top of our heads. We're pulling text from other sources and trying to rework. The question is, how much rephrasing do we have to do to avoid a duplicate content penalty? Do we make sure there are changes per paragraph, sentence, or phrase? Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | ericmccarty0 -
Duplicate content check picking up weird urls
Hi everyone, I love the duplicate content feature; we have a lot of duplicate content issues due to the way our site is structured. So, we're working on them. However, I'm not fully understanding the results. For example, say I have an article on breast cancer symptoms. It shows up as duplicate content, by having two urls that point to the exact same page. http://www.healthchoices.ca/articles/breast cancer symptoms and http://www.healthchoices.ca/somerandomstringofcode. I fully understand why that is duplicate content. I am not sure about this though, it picks up the same url twice and calls it duplicate content. For example, saying that http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so and http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so is duplicate...however is this not the same page? Is there something I'm missing? Many of the URL's are identical. Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0