Duplicate Version of My Website
-
Hello Again,
Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here.
Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before.
www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk
The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc
Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with.
Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.
-
Cheers Dirk,
I will look to implement this fix, as always you've been great!
-
Hi,
The reason why you have these duplicates is because the different domains you have all point to the same server - as a result the content is available on all these different url's.
To solve this - choose one principal domain (the one you want to keep)
Option 1: Edit the htaccess file and redirect the other url's to the main domain: to do this add these lines
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]The second line checks if the request url is has the form www.example.com
If not, the 3rd line is rewriting it to example.com
Suppose the site is called using www.test.com/article.htm - it fails the test on line 2 - it will be rewritten to www.example.com/article.htm
Option 2: Alternative is to choose "domain forwarding" - this a standard option most registrars provide to forward a domain to another domain (check with your registrar how to do this - make sure you choose a 301 type redirect & that the url changes to the destination url)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Replace www.example.com by your main site & you should be fine. The emails won't be affected - that's something which is defined on
-
Thanks for the reply patrick,
As a follow up, how would I go about re-directing these sites? Their content changes whenever I update the main site so i presume they are linked somehow. I have access to the root folder on the main site and cannot find any reference to them there.
If they are being hosted else-ware how is the content being updated immediatly
-
Hi there
You actually have a third site as well: http://www.atp-instrumentation.com/
You have a couple of options:
-
You can redirect to the two side sites to the main
-
Conduct a backlink audit for all sites
-
Correct good links
-
Remove bad links
-
Update your listings if these side sites have listings
-
You could put canonical tag on the side sites to the main site pages
-
I would still recommend a backlink audit
-
You could noindex,nofollow the two side sites
Whatever you do - make sure that update your backlinks and listings so that they are consistent. Also, when it comes to your company email addresses, this shouldn't be an issue, but if you decided to change your company emails, you could set up routing and/or forwarding to a new domain email address.
This will take discussions with your company and web development team as I am sure there are marketing materials out with email addresses and other information. It definitely goes beyond the opinions in this Q+A thread.
Like I said, having a different email address than your domain is not really that big of a deal, but there are options there as well.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
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
-
Why did my website DA fell down?
Hello, Could you please let me know why might my website's DA have fallen down in merely a week? What might be a reason? I also noticed traffic from google dropped down at the very same week. Will be very thankful for any advise!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Why my website does not index?
I made some changes in my website after that I try webmaster tool FETCH AS GOOGLE but this is 2nd day and my new pages does not index www. astrologersktantrik .com
Technical SEO | | ramansaab0 -
Duplicate content for vehicle inventory.
Hey all, In the automotive industry... When uploading vehicle inventory to a website I'm concerned with duplicate content issues. For example, 1 vehicle is uploaded to the main manufacturers website, then again to the actual dealerships website & then again to Craigslist & even sometimes to a group site. The information is all the same, description, notes, car details & images. What would you all recommend for alleviating duplicate content issues? Should I be using the rel canonical back to the manufacturers website? Once the vehicle is sold all pages disappear. Thanks so much for any advice.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Duplicate page issue
Hi, i have a serious duplicate page issue and not sure how it happened and i am not sure if anyone will be able to help as my site was built in joomla, it has been done through k2, i have never come across this issue before i am seem to have lots of duplicate pages under author names, example http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker this page is showing the full articles which is not great for seo and it is also showing that there are hundreds more articles at the bottom on the semoz tool i am using, it is showing these as duplicates although there are hundreds of them and it is causing google to see lots of duplicate pages. Diane Walker
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-2 5 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-210 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-297 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-3 5 1 0
Diane Walker can anyone please help me to sort this important issue out.0 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
Can duplicate [*] reports be suppressed?
That's the best question could come up with! Have searched but can't find any info. New user: First crawl error report show listings of pages with same titles/descriptions. In reality they are all the same page but with different parameters eg Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp?productId=xxxxxxxxx etc These have been excluded in both robots.txt (for some time ie disallow: /*?)and google webmaster tools (just done). Will they still show in updated report and if so is there a way to suppress them if the issues have been rectified as can be done in webmaster tools. Is there a way to test to see if they are being excluded by robots.txt and GWT?
Technical SEO | | RobWillox0 -
New website
Hello, How bad is going to be if I change my Joomla website to Wordpress? I can check the 100 best pages and redirect them to the new url with 301 but my website has 424 pages. If is this needs time, how long does it take to be in the same position? Is Google review my new website quickly? What about if I make my services more specific and the main topic is going to be smaller in pages? (Mpre social services pages vs. less pages about the main webdesign topic) I should change my website to WP but I am afraid because now I am in the 2. 🙂 Thanks! Regards,
Technical SEO | | Netkreativ
Misi0 -
Website IP Location
My main target audience is in the UK, but my website's IP is in the United States. Would it be worthwhile to change the IP to a UK address? How would I go about that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0