Duplicate Content Question
-
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique.
Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently?
I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue?
Thanks
Brian Clapp
-
You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page:
In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical
Hope this helps
-
its pretty awesome. Welcome
-
less than 24 hours into my seomoz pro membership and I'm already blown away - thanks for all of your assistance. Christine it appears I don't have a .htaccess file so I will follow what you wrote and create a new blank file with just that code in it...
you guys rock. I've got lots more learning to do....
Brian
-
Something that was challenging for me at first was finding .htaccess file. It should be in the root directory of where all of you website files are stored. It may be hidden or you may need to create one. If its hidden, find out how to un-hide files in your specific FTP program. If you need to create it, simply create a blank file with the name .htaccess and paste the recommendation that Ryan made.
-
Ryan thanks for your great advice. I'm the site founder but by no means a tech expert... I'm more the content guy, but I'm learning. I
understand what you have written...all except the part of where I put that code. Where do I find my .htaccess file?
-
Thank you for your great response Dave! I'm the founder of the site, but my background is more in content and I'm learning the SEO as I go, so forgive me if this is a silly follow up.
In reference to response #4 - my original designer said canonical was only on the home page, but your response sounds like it should be on every page? If so do I put the whole url for that page, or just the root? Again not an expert here so all this advice really helps me learn.
Thanks
Brian
-
- In addition to your 301 redirect issue Ryan mentioned you are internally linking to the non www version for your logo link: (this leaks juice on the redirect as well if you are going for the www version)
2 ) You really want to choose one version and go with it everywhere (be precise down to the trailing slash) - Google webmaster tools has a setting for this as well - sign up and choose your preferred setting / then save if you haven't already
-
Make the changes and check Open Site Explorer for both versions to see your links that appear the non-preferred way and see if you can contact your external linking sources to fix the issue to the preferred URL
-
I didn't see any canonical for the other pages (other than the home page) add those as well
-
Rerun OSE after your next crawl completes or use Xenu for immediate testing for the internal links - external may take a bit longer.
-
This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/
The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect adoptionhelp.org to www.adoptionhelp.org
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.adoptionhelp.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adoptionhelp.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.
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 Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello guys, After fixing the rel tag on similar pages on the site I thought that duplicate content issue were resolved. I checked HTML Improvements on GWT and instead of going down as I expected, it went up. The duplicate issues affect identical product pages which differ from each other just for one detail, let's say length or colour. I could write different meta tags as the duplicate is the meta description, and I did it for some products but still didn't have any effects and they are still showing as duplicates. What would the problem be? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Duplicate Content in Dot Net Nuke
Our site is built on Dot Net Nuke. SEOmoz shows a very large amount of duplicate content because at the beginning each page got an extension in the following format: www.domain.com/tabid/110/Default.aspx The site additionally exists without the tabid... part. Our web developer says an easy fix with a canonical tag or 301 redirect is not possible. Does anyone have DNN experience and can point us in the right direction? Thanks, Ricarda
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
A problem with duplicate content
I'm kind of new at this. My crawl anaylsis says that I have a problem with duplicate content. I set the site up so that web sections appear in a folder with an index page as a landing page for that section. The URL would look like: www.myweb.com/section/index.php The crawl analysis says that both that URL and its root: www.myweb.com/section/ have been indexed. So I appear to have a situation where the page has been indexed twice and is a duplicate of itself. What can I do to remedy this? And, what steps should i take to get the pages re-indexed so that this type of duplication is avoided? I hope this makes sense! Any help gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0