WordPress Duplicate URLs?
-
On my site, there are two different category bases leading to the exact same page. My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress, and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true?
Here's an example of the correct url. and...
Here's an example of the same exact content, but using a different url.
Notice that one is coming from /topics and the other is coming from /authors base. My understanding is that this is bad. Am I wrong?
-
My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress
WordPress does tend to create duplicate pages. However, they can be easily managed/prevented.
and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true?
You definitely need to worry about duplicate content - especially when there are auto-generated pages, category pages, author pages, and tag pages.
In your site the /authors/fear URL has "http://www.quotery.com/topics/fear/" set as the canonical URL. So, the developer did add a correct canonical setting to try and prevent duplicate content issues. However, a canonical setting is only a suggestion for the search engines and they do not necessarily adhere to the settings. Therefore, since the pages seem identical, I suggest noindexing the /authors/fear page.
-
It can be, especially if there is a lot of content on the site doing it. I would also be worried in this case because of the content is short (could be seen as thin) and is common quotes so it is probably duplicated on other sites. I would lean toward cleaning it up.
Yoast has a great tool for fixing this. That or I would noindex one category.
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
-
Penalties for duplicate content
Hello!We have a website with various city tours and activities listed on a single page (http://vaiduokliai.lt/). The list changes accordingly depending on filtering (birthday in Vilnius, bachelor party in Kaunas, etc.). The URL doesn't change. Content changes dynamically. We need to make URL visible for each category, then optimize it for different keywords (for example city tours in Vilnius for a list of tours and activities in Vilnius with appropriate URL /tours-in-Vilnius).The problem is that activities overlap very often in different categories, so there will be a lot of duplicate content on different pages. In such case, how severe penalty could be for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Image URL Change Catastrophe
We have a site with over 3mm pages indexed, and an XML sitemap with over 12mm images (312k indexed at peak). Last week our traffic dropped off a cliff. The only major change we made to the site in that time period was adding a DNS record for all of our images that moved them from a SoftLayer Object Storage domain to a subdomain of our site. The old URLs still work, but we changed all the links from across our site to the new subdomain. The big mistake we made was that we didn't update our XML sitemap to the new URLs until almost a week after the switch (totally forgot that they were served from a process with a different config file). We believe this was the cause of the issue because: The pages that dropped in traffic were the ones where the images moved, while other pages stayed more or less the same. We have some sections of our property where the images are, and have always been, hosted by Amazon and their rankings didn't crater. Same with pages that do not have images in the XML sitemap (like list pages). There wasn't a change in geographic breakdown of our traffic, which we looked at because the timing was around the same time as Pigeon. There were no warnings or messages in Webmaster Tools, to indicate a manual action around something unrelated. The number of images indexed in our sitemap according Webmaster Tools dropped from 312k to 10k over the past week. The gap between the change and the drop was 5 days. It takes Google >10 to crawl our entire site, so the timing seems plausible. Of course, it could be something totally unrelated and just coincidence, but we can't come up with any other plausible theory that makes sense given the timing and pages affected. The XML sitemap was updated last Thursday, and we resubmitted it to Google, but still no real change. Anyone had a similar experience? Any way to expedite the climb back to normal traffic levels? Screen%20Shot%202014-07-29%20at%203.38.34%20PM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wantering0 -
Expired urls
For a large jobs site, what would be the best way to handle job adverts that are no longer available? Ideas that I have include: Keep the url live with the original content and display current similar job vacancies below - this has the advantage of continually growing the number of indexed pages. 301 redirect old pages to parent categories - this has the advantage of concentrating any acquired link juice where it is most needed. Your thoughts much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
HTML for URL markup
Hi, We are changing our URLs to be more SEO friendly. Is there any negative impact or pitfall of using <base> HTML-tag? Our developers are considering it as a possible solution for relative URLs inside HTML-markup in the Friendly URL context.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
URL - Keywords
My domain name contains my top two keywords. Am I penalized if I create another page where I add my domain key words a 2nd time after the domain name along with a subcategory and the name of a state. I don't know what white hat and black hat is so I want to make sure I stay white hat. Also I didn't know it but is it true that your title shows up in your domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0