How to protect against duplicate content?
-
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
-
Is it on its own domain or subdomain? You can exclude the entire thing in robots.txt, then verify the site in GWT and request exclusion of the entire dev site.
-
No index No Follow in the header.
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
-
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Duplicate homepage content across multiple websites
Hi, I work for a company that runs 30+ membership based websites on separate domains and across multiple markets. The homepage for each site contains a section of content that highlights the site benefits and features. While each website serves a different market/niche, this section of content is essentially the same as each website offers the same benefits and features. What is the best way to avoid duplicate content issues while still being able to show the same section of content across 30+ sites? This particular section of content isn't valuable from an SEO perspective, but the rest of the content on that page is. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Shopify duplicate content issue
We recently moved out site to shopify but now have a duplicate content issue as we have the same products in different collections. I have added canonical code to get rid of this but my webmaster tools still shows hundreds of duplicate pages. How can I tell if the code I added is working? How long will it take for google to recognise this and drop the duplicates from their index and is this likely to have a significant impact on SERPS? Our we page is www.devoted2vintage.co.uk. Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | devoted2vintage1 -
Fix duplicate content caused by tags
Hi everyone, TGIF. We are getting hundreds of duplicate content errors on our WP site by what appears to be our tags. For each tag and each post we are seeing a duplicate content error. I thought I had this fixed but apparently I do not. We are using the Genesis theme with Yoast's SEO plugin. Does anyone have the solution to what I imagine is this easy fix? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0 -
301ed Pages Still Showing as Duplicate Content in GWMT
I thank anyone reading this for their consideration and time. We are a large site with millions of URLs for our product pages. We are also a textbook company, so by nature, our products have two separate ISBNs: a 10 digit and a 13 digit form. Thus, every one of our books has at least two pages (10 digit and 13 digit ISBN page). My issue is that we have established a 301 for all the 10 digit URLs so they automatically redirect to the 13 digit page. This fix has been in place for months. However, Google still reports that they are detecting thousands of pages with duplicate title and meta tags. Google is referring to these page URLs that I already have 301ed to the canonical version many months ago! Is there anything that I can do to fix this issue? I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Example:
Technical SEO | | dfinn
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=9780321676672
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X As you can see the 10 digit ISBN page 301s to 13 digit canonical version. Google reports that they have detected duplicate title and meta tags between the two pages and there are thousands of these duplicate pages listed. To add some further context: The ISBN is just a parameter that allows us to provide content when someone searches for a product with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN. The 13 digit version of the page is the only physical page that exists, the 10 digit is only a part of the virtual URL structure of the website. This is why I cannot simply change the title and meta tags of the 10 digit pages because they only exist in the sense that the URL redirects to the 13 digit version. Also, we submit a sitemap every day of all the 13 digit pages so Google knows exactly what our physical URL structure is. I have submitted this question to GWMT forums and received no replies.0 -
What are some of the negative effects of having duplicate content from other sites?
This could include republishing several articles from another site with permission.
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Duplicate content domains ranking successfully
I have a project with 8 domains and each domain is showing the same content (including site structure) and still all sites do rank. When I search for a specific word-string in google it lists me all 8 domains. Do you have an explanation, why Google doesn't filter those URLs to just one URL instead of 8 with the same content?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0