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
-
Backup Server causing duplicate content flag?
Hi, Google is indexing pages from our backup server. Is this a duplicate content issue? There are essentially two versions of our entire domain indexed by Google. How do people typically handle this? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Duplicating relevant category content in subcategories. Good or bad for google ranking?
In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages. For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.0 -
How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Guest blogging and duplicate content
I have a guest blog prepared and several sites I can submit it to, would it be considered duplicate content if I submitted one guest blog post to multipul blogs? and if so this content is not on my site but is linking to it. What will google do? Lets say 5 blogs except the same content and post it up, I understand that the first blog to have it up will not be punished, what about the rest of the blogs? can they get punished for this duplicate content? can I get punished for having duplicate content linking to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
How to compete with duplicate content in post panda world?
I want to fix duplicate content issues over my eCommerce website. I have read very valuable blog post on SEOmoz regarding duplicate content in post panda world and applied all strategy to my website. I want to give one example to know more about it. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas Non WWW version: http://vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas redirect to home page. For HTTPS pages: https://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas I have created Robots.txt file for all HTTPS pages as follow. https://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt And, set Rel=canonical to HTTP page as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas Narrow by search: My website have narrow by search and contain pages with same Meta info as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?cat=7 http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?manufacturer=Bond+MFG http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?finish_search=Aluminum I have restricted all dynamic pages by Robots.txt which are generated by narrow by search. http://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt And, I have set Rel=Canonical to base URL on each dynamic pages. Order by pages: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name I have restrict all pages with robots.txt and set Rel=Canonical to base URL. For pagination pages: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=2 I have restrict all pages with robots.txt and set Rel=Next & Rel=Prev to all paginated pages. I have also set Rel=Canonical to base URL. I have done & apply all SEO suggestions to my website but, Google is crawling and indexing 21K+ pages. My website have only 9K product pages. Google search result: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&gl=US&q=site:www.vistastores.com&biw=1366&bih=520 Since last 7 days, my website have affected with 75% down of impression & CTR. I want to recover it and perform better as previous one. I have explained my question in long manner because, want to recover my traffic as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1 -
Duplicate content ramifications for country TLDs
We have a .com site here in the US that is ranking well for targeted phrases. The client is expanding its sales force into India and South Africa. They want to duplicate the site entirely, twice. Once for each country. I'm not well-versed in international SEO. Will this cause a duplicate content filter? Would google.co.in and google.co.za look at google.com's index for duplication? Thanks. Long time lurker, first time question poster.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alter_Imaging0