Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content issue
-
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic.
Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version:
http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes
That page also has a link to a printer friendly version
http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes
and so on and so on.......
Some of these pages are being included in Google's index.
I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted.
Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
-
use the rel=canonical on the main page/s to show that they are the original/source/master page of the content.
See this helpful guide:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
Don't forget you can also tell Googlebot to ignore certain URL parameters to prevent them being indexed and treated as duplicate content.
"If your site uses URL parameters, some of the parameters may be unnecessary for page navigation. Asking Google to ignore these parameters can reduce duplicate content in Google's index and make the site more crawlable."
This is done through Google.com/Webmasters - Your Domain - Dashboard - Settings - Parameter Handling.
-
I believe this may cause duplicate content issues.
If possible, remove the link to the printer friendly version from the printer friendly pages.
http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7 would have a link to printer friendly page.
http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes If &printfriendly = true, do not display the link.
Also ensure you're using rel=canonical to show that http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7 is the actual page that should be indexed. The following should be placed in the head tags of the printer friendly page:
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 -
Duplicate content issues... en-gb V en-us
Hi everyone, I have a global client with lots of duplicate page issues, mainly because they have duplicate pages for US, UK and AUS... they do this because they don't offer all services in all markets, and of course, want to show local contact details for each version. What is the best way to handle this for SEO as clearly I want to rank the local pages for each country. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Algorhythm_jT0 -
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
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 on job sites
Hi, I have a question regarding job boards. Many job advertisers will upload the same job description to multiple websites e.g. monster, gumtree, etc. This would therefore be viewed as duplicate content. What is the best way to handle this if we want to ensure our particular site ranks well? Thanks in advance for the help. H
Technical SEO | | HiteshP0 -
.com and .co.uk duplicate content
hi mozzers I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content
I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website. A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website. Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking? My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation. Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CyberAlien0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0