Best way to deal with over 1000 pages of duplicate content?
-
Hi
Using the moz tools i have over a 1000 pages of duplicate content. Which is a bit of an issue!
95% of the issues arise from our news and news archive as its been going for sometime now.
We upload around 5 full articles a day. The articles have a standalone page but can only be reached by a master archive. The master archive sits in a top level section of the site and shows snippets of the articles, which if a user clicks on them takes them to the full page article. When a news article is added the snippets moves onto the next page, and move through the page as new articles are added.
The problem is that the stand alone articles can only be reached via the snippet on the master page and Google is stating this is duplicate content as the snippet is a duplicate of the article.
What is the best way to solve this issue?
From what i have read using a 'Meta NoIndex' seems to be the answer (not that i know what that is). from what i have read you can only use a canonical tag on a page by page basis so that going to take to long.
Thanks Ben
-
Hi Guys,
Thanks for your help.
I decided that updating the robot text would be the best option.
Ben
-
Technically, your URL:
http://www.capitalspreads.com/news
is really:
http://www.capitalspreads.com/news/index.php
So just add this line to robots.txt:
Disallow: /news/index.php
You won't be disallowing the pages underneath it but you will be blocking the page that contains all dupe content.
Also, if you prefer to do this with a meta tag on the news page, you could always do "noindex, follow" to make sure Google follows the links - they just don't index the page.
-
It may not be helpful to you in this situation. I was just saying that if your server creates multiple URLs containing the same content, as long as those URLs also contain the identical rel=canonical directive, a single canonical version of that content will be established.
-
Hi Chris,
I've read about the canonicalization but from what i could work I'd have to tag each of the 400 plus page individually to solve the issue and i don't think this is the best use of anyone's time.
I don't under how placing the tag and pointing back at itself will help? Can you explain a little more.
Ideally i want the full article page to be indexed as this will be more beneficial to the user. By placing the canonical tag on the snippets page and pointing it to itself would i not be telling the spider this is the page to index?
Here some examples
http://www.capitalspreads.com/news - Snippets page
http://www.capitalspreads.com/news/uk-economic-recovery-will-take-years - Full article, that would ideally be the page that wants to be indexed.
Regards
Ben
-
Ben, you use the rel=canonical directive in the header of the page with the original source of the content (pointing to itself), every reproduction of that page that also contains the rel=canonical directive pointing to the original source. So it's not necessarily a page by page solution. Have you read through this yet? Canonicalization and the Canonical Tag - Learn SEO - Moz
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 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I just had my site crawled by the seomoz robot and it came back with some errors. Basically it seems the categories and dates are not crawling directly. I'm a SEO newbie here Below is a capture of the video of what I am talking about. Any ideas on how to fix this? Hkpekchp
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
Duplicate Content?
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.) But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it? Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
Technical SEO | | sakeith0 -
Once duplicate content found, worth changing page or forget it?
Hi, the SEOmoz crawler has found over 1000 duplicate pages on my site. The majority are based on location and unfortunately I didn't have time to add much location based info. My question is, if Google has already discovered these, determined they are duplicate, and chosen the main ones to show on the SERPS, is it worth me updating all of them with localalized information so Google accepts the changes and maybe considers them different pages? Or do you think they'll always be considered duplicates now?
Technical SEO | | SpecialCase0