Duplicate Forum Content
-
HI everyone,
great to be here, absolutely loving everything, please go easy on me I'm quite a noob when it comes to seo, but hopefully my question isn't too basic.
After running the initial checks on my websites, I found there are 7,646 duplicate pages? Some are easy fixes but the majority are not, being forum pages, the edit, quote and new post links are coming up as duplicates of the main post?
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Best Lee
-
How delightful that you refer to Invisionpower as I recently took the software for a test drive and plan to purchase it in January
A question though that has been troubling me. I use a paid for hosting service, which forwards to one of my sub-domains. The problem is I have nearly 7k pages of duplicate content (all from the forum), I really want to add a no follow and then remove the forum pages from the search index and thus remove all of the duplicate content. Though I'm worried that adding no follow to the sub domain may impact on the main site.
I have a lot of page one search positions, many long tails which combined result in a lot of visits, but I also have a couple of short phrases that get 50% of the visits alone, so I can't risk making any changes, actually I'm pretty terrified to make any changes, just in case all of my website pages are removed from the index.
-
invisionpower forum is good choice, as i knew. Found duplicated content pages here, it happens with most of forums, but there is full provision that this can resolved by canonical or stop crawling one you don't want in robots.txt.
-
Hey
just found some valuable info which has solved a lot of my problems, modified .htaccess which has removed all of the non www links, so thats a part solve.
I think what I'm going to do is purchase the new forum software, setup a robot.txt to not crawl the new forums and then once I have all of the posts transfered to the new forum, remove the old forums from the index.
That should solve it, the new forum is very well established and if need be I can pay one of their developers to incorporate some seo feature that will stop the duplicate content issue. Once thats solved I can remove the robot.txt
Many thanks, Lee
-
Hi, still one more thing, because you sound loss, and that's not the meaning of this Q&A. Contact the forumservice and ask for the canonical, this is a very simple and common thing to do.
-
Ok thanks Leonie,
still no nearer to knowing what to do, I know theres a problem and generally what I need to do, but I'm still at a complete loss as to how to do it
But thank you for trying to help,
Best, Lee
-
Seo stuff is'nt that difficult, though it can be comlicated
Anyway I wish you luck with the forum and hope you'll manage to get it the way you wanted.
Grtz, Leonie
-
Mmmm this is becoming more problematic by the minute, will need to implement robot.txt before removing the urls.
And there was me thinking this seo stuff would be easy.
-
Lol, tha'ts also an option
under url's index, though they have to be removed first, otherwise google crawl them again. but there you can remove complete directories at once.
-
or go somewhere else lol, have been considering buying invisionpower forum for a while, this might be the final push I needed.
Is there a way of mass deleting pages from the index in webmaster tools, i.e. all links that contain edit, quote and new ect?
-
Ah okay, that will be difficult than.
Maybe you can ask them to implement the canonical url. It will be helpful for you to avoid duplicates
-
is a paid forum service, but they give you the ability to add code snippets in the head.
-
Hi Lee,
What kind of CMS are you using?
In wmt under parameters you can configure parameters. If the ur's contain the same parameter it is a posibility.
-
Hi Leonie,
thanks for taking the time to answer
Not sure if that will work, there is only one head (hope that makes sense). Forums work pretty much the same as content management systems. I have the ability to change what's contained in the head, but adding rel="canonical" will have the same effect on all pages, even the duplicate one (I think).
Is there a way of removing all pages from the index (in webmaster tools) that contain the word edit, or quote or new? Kind of like using a wild card?
-
Hi Lee,
I'm not very familiar with forums. but i think you can solve it by putting a canonical in the head.
If you have a main page, which is the post, put a canonical url in it:
the duplicate pages need to have the same canonical.
I hope this work for you.
Grtz, Leonie
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
-
2 Domains, 1 Brand - Content Marketing Strategy Question
I have a customer that has two separate locations for the same business on two different URLs (both connected via Landing Page). I cannot change this. They are in the powersports industry (snowmobiles, ATVs, motorcycles, dirt bikes, etc). The locations are about 10 miles from one another, essentially sell the same brands & products (there are 1 or 2 exceptions), have the same target audience (local & from out-of-state), and have the same goals. They currently rank #1 and #2 for their industry in their area. They now want a content marketing strategy. I face limitations with the CMS (no blog abilities and technical issues that are out of my control), and content marketing can really only consist of custom graphics & custom page creation. Typically, custom pages are utilized by creating Brand Pages describing the major brands to built out authority in those categories, and then try to branch out from there to create individual product-category pages with more unique content to answer more of a question based on the intent. I am very concerned about creating content that will be too similar between the two locations and will thus compete with the other location, so I am thinking I should devise a completely different strategy for 1 location over the other. Is that a good idea? I think with the smaller location, I choose the typical route of creating brand pages, product pages, etc, and then with the bigger location, try to focus on unique content such as buyer's guide, local SEO ideas about the area, FAQs, testimonials, etc. Thoughts/ideas?
Content Development | | Crichardson19900 -
Any recommendations on a Content Marketing Firm?
I have used several and had some good results. Am wondering if I can find one that is more cost effective than who I am using now, as they just doubled their prices.
Content Development | | RoxBrock0 -
Kickass Tool for Content Writers
I have been a writer for a long time. I have done a lot of writing. Many excellent teachers, professors, bosses, colleagues, and editors have helped me. I've responded to a lot of red ink - a lot of red ink. A few days ago, I found a tool that has been extremely helpful. It has significantly improved the clarity of my writing. Using it on a piece of work makes me more confident about it at publication time. It requires a lot of work to use (at least it does for me) but the results are well worth the time. People who are serious about writing well will understand this tool immediately. http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ I don't own this website (I wish I did) and have no affiliation with it. Today they released a desktop version that they are almost giving away. I have not tried it yet but plan to instal it today.
Content Development | | EGOL6 -
How do I split page content?
So I offer two services for which each has an FAQ page (let's call them S1 and S2). The problem is that I also have a longer FAQ page that covers both services (S1-2). I would like to eliminate the longer one and attach the relevant content to each of the shorter pages but i'm concerned that deleting pages with a lot of content might be a bad idea. I could redirect I suppose but I wouldn't know which page S1 or S2 to point redirect to. Any advice on this?
Content Development | | NationalPardon0 -
Suggest Me About my Site Content
I have build a " Healthy Breakfast " related website...I have some post on my site related "health breakfast" keywords.But i am not sure is my Content is Doing well to beat my Competitor or what type content i should write My Competitor for " healthy Breakfast" keywords are : http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-favorites/healthy-meals/breakfast-to-go-10000001047596/index.html http://www.eatingwell.com/nutrition_health/nutrition_news_information/healthy_breakfast_foods_for_weight_loss http://www.womenshealthmag.com/nutrition/healthy-breakfast http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/recipes/healthy-eating/nutrition/the-you-can-do-it-diet-breakfast-choices-/ http://www.foodnetwork.com/topics/healthy-breakfast/ Actually I am confused what i should write to keep my traffics happy and get Good Rank in Google Let me know if you have any more info thanks
Content Development | | seolearner0070 -
Am I spreading my content & site thin?
I have a video section on my site. Basically I am filtering quality videos for my readers to check out. The videos are pretty much all embedded youtube/vimeo vids. There are a few categories, which are pretty niche-y in relation to my readers. In general they probably aren't seen as too relevant to the overall content on my site... Is it a mistake to keep these videos up? Could they be messing up my rankings since they aren't necessarily in line with the rest of the content on my site?
Content Development | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Content Writers / Blog Posts
Hi there Would anyone know where i could fund affordable, reliable blog post writers who would be able to produce quality posts at affordable rates? What would the accepted rate be etc? Regards Stef
Content Development | | stefanok0 -
Why is this store getting hurt in SERPs when they removed duplicate content?
I work with an e-commerce client who got hit hard by Panda. They are very cautious, and want small-scale tests to prove each hypothesis before committing to larger changes. Recently, we reworked content on 30 product detail pages. Before, these product pages featured some original content mixed with some manufacturer content. The change we made was to remove the manufacturer content completely from the product page, leaving about 300 words of high-quality, original content--all of which was written by subject matter experts. I assumed that Google viewed this manufacturer text as duplicate content. However, when these 30 modified pages were compared to the control, they performed significantly worse. Question 1: Does any have any idea why these pages would perform worse than the control?
Content Development | | merch_zzounds
Question 2: Do you have any tips for convincing this client to try another test or get the buy-in to make the larger changes that--in theory--need to happen? FWIW, this client has about 10,000 product detail pages--the vast majority of which contain just manufacturer content. I appreciate your thoughts.0