Duplicate content due to parked domains
-
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues.
12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website
1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address
2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates?
3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects.
4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index
5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content.
Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
-
Oh, wow - if you're talking a couple of years ago and major ranking drops, then definitely get aggressive. Remove as many as possible and Robots No-index them. If you've got the Robots.txt directives in place, Google shouldn't put them back (although, from past experience, I realize "shouldn't" isn't a guarantee). If you're down 90%, you've got very little to lose and clearly Google didn't like something about that set-up.
Unfortunately, that's about the most drastic, reasonable option. The next step would be to start over with a fresh domain and kill all of the old domains. That could be a lot more hazardous, though.
-
Thank you Dr. Peter.
Couple of years ago my search engine positions tanked by around 90% and have not picked up back yet. At that time assumed it was due to the duplicate content on these domains, as they were parked ( Not 301, just domain masking) at that point. To avoid that duplicate content problem I moved to 301 redirection. None of these domains have any link juice to speak. Some domains have some typein traffic. I was just trying to capture them rather than link jiuice.
I did de-index most of the domains from webmaster tools in the past. But Google put them back, after 90 days or so. 301 redirection in place did not help that much.
If Google thinks there is a chance of abuse of the 301 of new domains, I would start removing the new domains completely and point else where so that Google can have some new content.
Thank youAji Abraham -
Ugh... 75 is a chunk. The problem is that Google isn't a huge fan of 301-redirecting a bunch of new domains, because it's been too often abused in the past by people buying up domains with history and trying to consolidate PageRank. So, it's possible that (1) they're suspicious of these domains, or (2) they're just not crawling/caching them in a timely manner, since they used to be parked.
Personally, unless there's any link value at all to these, I'd consider completely de-indexing the duplicate domains - at this point that probably does mean removal in Google Search Console and adding Robots.txt (which might be a prerequisite of removal, but I can't recall).
Otherwise, your only real option is just to give the 301-redirects time. It may be a non-issue, and Google is just taking its time. Ultimately, the question is whether these are somehow harming the parent site. If Google is just indexing a few pages but you're not being harmed, I might leave it alone and let the 301s do their work over time. I checked some headers, and they seem to be set up properly.
If you're seeing harm or the wrong domains being returned in search, and if no one is linking to those other domains, then I'd probably be more aggressive and go for all-out removal.
-
Hello Dr.Peter
Thank you for helping out.
There are around 75 or so domains pointing to the main website. When they were parked (prior to November 2014) on the main site, they were added as additional domains, which were url masked. So at least 30 domains were indexed in google with same content as main content.
12 months back, I realized the duplicate content error and changed the domain parking to 301 redirects. Also used ‘remove url’ functionality in Google Webmaster tools. Even after 12 months, I noticed a number of domains had duplicate contents in google index.
This I removed the pages from the addon domains again using google webmaster tools.To give you an idea my main site with original content/links is iscripts.com and an addon domain socialappster.com is pointed to a product page at iscripts.com/socialware. If you do a site: socialappster.com in google you find few pages in google index, even though it is 301 redirect for more than 12 months now. Similar issue with other domains pointing to product pages as well as whole site.
Appreciate any direction you can provide to clean this mess.
Thanks
Aji Abraham
-
Oh, and how many domains are we talking (ballpark)?
-
What was happening when they were parked - were they 302-redirected or was it some kind of straight CNAME situation where, theoretically, Google shouldn't have even seen the parked domains? Trick, of course, is that Google is a registrar, so they can see a lot that isn't necessarily public or crawlable.
Did the additional domains get indexed while parked, or after you went to 301-redirects?
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
-
Duplicate content created by website Calendar - A Penalty?
A colleague of mine asked me a question about duplicate content coming from their event calendar. I don't think this will affect them negatively, but I would love some feedback and thoughts. ThanksOne of my clients, LifeTech Academy, is using my RavenTools software. Raventools has reported a HUGE amount of duplicate content (4.4K instances).The duplicate content all revolves around their calendar and repeating events (http://lifetechacademy.org/events/)The question is this - will this impact their SEO efforts in a negative way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill_K0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
I have a question regarding parking good value domain.
I have a question regarding parking good value domain. A client has a great website 'A' with page rank of 5 and a lot of traffic. They want to change the URL and redesign the site. So they have parked the domain 'A' and will later redirect it to the new domain, this will be in a month time. My questions is, by parking the old domain 'A' would they have lost its SEO value or will it be given to the new URL once they place a 301 redirect on it. Also, would it not have been better not to park domain 'A', keep it live and just redirect it once new domain goes live, notifying Google in Webmaster tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrangeGuys0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Get Duplicate Page content for same page with different extension ?
I have added a campaign like "Bannerbuzz" in SEOMOZ Pro account and before 2 or 3 days i got errors related to duplicate page content . they are showing me same page with different extension. As i mentioned below http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
&
http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor_vinyl_banner.php We checked our whole source files but we didn't define php related urls in our source code. we want to catch only our .html related urls. so, Can you please guide us to solve this issue ? Thanks <colgroup><col width="857"></colgroup>
| http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html |0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0