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
-
Does google penalize you if you post content in french and english on a website
I'm trying to encourage content editors to only post content in either English or French. For example we have a French press release but the team are wanting it on our site in French and English. I thought this would fall under duplicate content rules. Does google penalize you if you post content in French and English on a website?
Content Development | | EstherBrice0 -
Content - Similar but not exactly the same content - Duplicate or Spammy?
Hey, so I have been wondering for some time now as some pages will get indexed and others won't appear at all. That makes me think that I am either creating to similar content or it is becoming too spammy. Take these two pages I created for example. The body content is very similar but h tags, meta tags and title are different. So my questions is; would pages not be displaying due possibly being too similar and spammy or duplicate? I have linked two pages that are very similar below and would love to hear any thoughts about it. https://www.dlmremovals.com.au/queensland/interstate/removalists/gold-coast-to-ballarat-removalist-backloads-and-moving-service.html https://www.dlmremovals.com.au/queensland/interstate/removalists/gold-coast-to-bendigo-removalist-backloads-and-moving-service.html Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | Niclasfa0 -
The etiquette of reproducing someone else's content
Hello - Here is a scenario, representative of something that I just saw play out. Site A is a new blog about travel (as an example topic) Site B is an older, established blog about travel Site C is a new blog launched and owned by Site B that focuses on a particular travel niche (luxury travel, for example) Here is what happens next Site A writes an original piece of content Site C then republishes Site A's content, paraphrasing all of the text, but giving Site A credit with a link Site B (the established site) publishes a blurb about the article, directing readers with a link to "read more" on Site C. It credits Site A as the original author, but does not link to it. If you were able to follow that, here is what I would like to know. Did Site C do anything wrong by republishing a paraphrased version of Site A's content, even though it gave credit with a link? Did Site B do anything wrong by linking to Site C (which is for all intents and purposes the same website), but not linking to Site A (the original source)? My sense is that the established blog (Site B) is trying to get it's new publication (Site C) to outrank the original author (Site A) using its own content. In general though, I am curious to get some thoughts on this situation because it raises a few ethical questions that I am not sure about, namely: Is there anything wrong with publishing "spun" content, if it is done well and links back to the source? Is there anything wrong with linking to a republished version of an article on a sister website, rather than linking to the original article. Thanks
Content Development | | timsegraves1 -
Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog
EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand. I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content. Please bear with me. I am adept technically. I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology. So I’m trying to attack problems one at time. Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles ** We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles. We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog. Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages. We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same. http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5 Page Title = Site Name http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10 Page Title = Site Name A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc. Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates. What is the best practice / approach? Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages? Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles? Other thoughts?
Content Development | | Romana0 -
How often should content be updated
With all of Google's recent algo updates (or ranking updates, whatever they're calling it now), we've obviously been looking into changing our content strategy and shifting it from quantity to quality. How often would you say is ideal for website content updates? i.e. should we be updating once a month? Once every couple of months? This isn't a blog - just a regular services-oriented site. My take on it is that it should be as often as organically possible - and that means something different for everyone. At the same time, we want Google coming back frequently to crawl the site. Thanks!
Content Development | | eyecarepro0 -
Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site
I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?
Content Development | | andywozhere0 -
Integration of content on other sites
(by Google Traductor) Hello, we are able to make agreements with sites of good quality and reputation to integrate our classified ads for agropeuariosector on the websites of these companies. We fear that thesesites begin to index all this content and begin to compete with us in organic positioning. On the other hand this would generateduplicate content? That strategy will be applied in order to do so. Greetings and thanks!
Content Development | | romaro
Robert0 -
Archive older, low ranked content to help new content in Panda 2.2?
After watching the white board friday re: Panda 2.2, it got me to thinking about old content. One of the sites that I work with generates 3-10 new articles/day (movie reviews, interviews, guides, event previews, etc) and has been doing so since 2005. Now, they have almost 10k articles, 7k of which are indexed. The quality of the content varies, and much of it is dated (movies, events) much of the amount of older content gets 0-5 pageviews/month, made in the days BEFORE the site was using Google News + social tools to spread the word (and backlinks). Note that those older articles also of course tend to have 100% bounce, and small/zero TOS. Is this hurting the site? With 75-100 articles/month being published, I want to make sure they get maximum exposure. I'm also concerned that crawlers get sucked into the site chasing down old BS content, and that is hurting it as well. What to do with this content? Should I unpublish unpopular, dated content and get it off the internet? Or, do I leave it on, but NOINDEX it so Google won't crawl it?
Content Development | | EricPacifico0