Subdomain Severe Duplicate Content Issue
-
Hi
A subdomain for our admin site has been indexed and it has caused over 2000 instances of duplicate content. To fix this issue, is a 301 redirect or canoncial tag the best option?
Really appreciate your advice
J
-
If the admin subdomain is used for any testing purposes, then I wouldn't redirect it. If there is no specific use for it, you could do a 301.
If it is used for testing purposes, then you could:
- block the crawlers
- noindex the pages (as Ryan mentioned it above)
- use canonical to the www. version
I hope it was helpful.
Gr., Keszi
-
Meta=NOINDEX is another option, but it sounds like the pages on your admin subdomain are getting published directly to your main site, so that could cause some major problems if that tag carried over. Be sure to test! Here's Google help page on this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
-
Hi Keszi
Thank you for the reply. So for the 100's of pages that are indexed, you would recommend just leaving them until they drop out rather than redirecting them?
Thank you
J
-
Hi,
I'd completely deny access for robots to the subdomain. For this I would create a robots.txt for the subdomain (place it in the folder of the subdomain) which would state the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /This way your content from the subdomain won't be crawled by search engines -> no content duplication issue for search engines.
Gr., Keszi
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
-
When is Duplicate Content Duplicate Content
Hi, I was wondering exactly when duplicate content is duplicate content? Is it always when it is word-for-word or if it is similar? For example, we currently have an information page and I would like to add a FAQ to the website. There is, however, a crossover with the content and some of it is repeated. However, it is not written word for word. Could you please advise me? Thanks a lot Tom
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
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 Content?
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.) But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it? Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
Technical SEO | | sakeith0 -
Subdomains Issue
Hi , We have created sub domains of our site to target various Geo´s. For example, geo, uk.site.com, de.site,com and all these sub domains have the same content as main domain. Will it affect our SEO Rankings? How can we solve this if it affects our rankings?
Technical SEO | | mikerbrt240 -
Techniques for diagnosing duplicate content
Buonjourno from Wetherby UK 🙂 Diagnosing duplicate content is a classic SEO skill but I'm curious to know what techniques other people use. Personally i use webmaster tools as illustrated here: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/webmaster-tools-duplicate.jpg but what other techniques are effective? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
David0 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Multiple URLs in CMS - duplicate content issue?
So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco. Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages). However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure. However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page. Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas. I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success. How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content? Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0