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
-
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Uservoice and Duplicate Page Content
Hello All, I'm having an issue where the my UserVoice account is creating duplicate page content (image attached). Any ideas on how to resolve the problem? A couple solutions we're looking into: moving the uservoice content inside the app, so it won't get crawled, but that's all we got for now. Thank you very much for your time any insight would be helpful. Sincerely,
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird1
Jon Birdsong SalesLoft duplicate duplicate0 -
What to do about similar content getting penalized as duplicate?
We have hundreds of pages that are getting categorized as duplicate content because they are so similar. However, they are different content. Background is that they are names and when you click on each name it has it's own URL. What should we do? We can't canonical any of the pages because they are different names. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Tags causing Duplicate page content?
I was looking through the 'Duplicate Page Content' and Too Many On-Page Link' errors and they all seem to be linked to the 'Tags' on my blog pages. Is this really a problem and if so how should I be using tags properly to get the best SEO rewards?
Technical SEO | | zapprabbit1 -
Mapping Internal Links (Which are causing duplicate content)
I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else). I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird. Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0