Duplicate Content Resolution Suggestion?
-
SEOmoz tools is saying there is duplicate content for:
What would be the best way to resolve this "error"?
-
Does having the line:
DirectoryIndex index.html
Have any use in addition to the lines you posted?
Thanks.
-
Stephen I agree with the KISS method. Using an htaccess RewriteCond is not the simplest solution for someone who does not know htaccess syntax. In an effort to fully answer this, here is the typical code we are referring to:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]The first 2 lines are typical commands to Follow Symbolic links, and make sure that the rewrite engine is in the on state.
The first RewriteCond looks at the host, and if it is not the www. version the RewriteRule will redirect the visitor to the http://www. version of your site.
The second RewriteCond looks at whether this is an index.html file, if it is, it will the RewriteRule will 301 redirect them to the version with out the index.html, just yoursite.com/
-
Im a KISS guy, duplicate content pages should just be handled with a rewrite, then they don't appear in any of your stats, attract links, spread your like/tweet numbers over multiple pages, if you are using xml files to keep tabs on your indexing etc and give you a better idea of whats going on on your site
Also, you have to take into account Facebook likes, page tweets, +1s etc - does rel canonical work on the social graph data?
rel canonical sort orders etc but if its a pure duplicate, then 301
"Dont link to page X on your site" isnt really a good solution in my eyes, too much room for error
-
Completely agree.
I think II may have been slightly confused by thinking the default for www.mydomain.com/ was not iindex.html
-
Yes, by the original posting your impression is correct and are the same page, but you can't 301 an index.html page to the domain where the index.html is the page that shows by default.
You could use an htaccess RewriteCond, but could be a little overkill for this situation, where adding a canonical will solve it.
-
I was under the impression that www.mydomain.com/ and www.mydomain.com/index.html were both indexing but are the same page
-
If the index.html is their home page that shows up when just doing the domain: http://www.mydomain.com/
then what would you 301 to? Are you assuming that it is a site that is using a index.php, index.htm, index.asp, etc.?
PlasticCards stated that there is a duplicate content, therefore the index.html page actually exists and should use a canonical.
-
I think in that particular situation I would use 301 as there really isn't a separate use for the /index.html page
-
or 301 redirect in your .htaccess and then you don't have to worry about link issues etc
-
Use a rel='canonical' and use the non index.html for the href;
also don't link to the index.html from anywhere.
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, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us. See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts. We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz. We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well. Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | bradhodson0 -
Partially duplicated content on separate pages
TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO? Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages. Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable. For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course. Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry". There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Product Duplicate Content Issue with Google Shopping
I have a site with approx 20,000 products. These products are resold to hundreds of other companies and are fed from one database therefore the content is duplicated many many times. To overcome this, we are launching the site with noindex meta tags on all product pages. (In phase 2 we will begin adding unique content for every product eek) However, we still want them to appear in Google Shopping. Will this happen or will it have to wait until we remove the noindex tags?
Technical SEO | | FGroup0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Duplicate page content errors in SEOmoz
Hi everyone, we just launched this new site and I just ran it through SEOmoz and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors. Here's one example -- it says these 3 are duplicate content: http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-black-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-camel-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-gray-3inch You'll see from the pages that the titles, images and small pieces of the copy are all unique -- but there is some copy that is the same (after all, these are pretty much the same shoe, just a different color). So, why am I getting this error and is there any best way to address? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | ketanmv
Ketan0 -
Duplicate content issues caused by our CMS
Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?
Technical SEO | | themegroup0