Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
-
Hi,
i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop.
I'm grateful for any kind of help!
Thx,
boris -
Hey guys,
thanks for your reactions. Appreciate it!
I guess it's time to roll up the sleaves...
cheers,
Boris
-
+1 to what Danny said. A couple other thoughts:
- +3000 4xx client errors: do any of these have many links or a significant amount of traffic? If not and they aren't a large portion of your overall site, it's not a big deal.
- **+3000 duplicate content issues: **as Danny said, there is likely a trend here, try to identify it and resolve it in mass rather than going page by page.
- **+35000 temporary redirects: **are any of these temporary redirects to important pages? If so, it's worth changing them to 301s. However, if they are all pointing to old, deep and weak pages then it's likely not a big concern again.
Daniel
-
This happens with all ecommerce platforms.
This is usually due to the categories on your site duplicating your pages.
You may have one product that is available in different colours so two links are being created. For example www.car.com/new-car
and
www.car.com/new-car=blue might be the exact same page.
Search engines are unsure which page to index from your website and they are very unlikely to show multiple or duplicate product pages within their index.
So, you need to inform search engines which page you wish for them to index.
The best way to solve these issues is to simply go through each error and solve it. You will start to notice a pattern in the duplicate content URLs and redirects. This should speed up the process. You could either add in canonical tags or simply use your robots file to block google crawling particular URL extensions. I have stopped bots from crawling my ecommerce pages that end with the parameter "route=product/search&tag" and "product-id" as these are non SEO friendly URLS that are duplicated versions of my pages.
Make sure that you also remove dead links and remove links that are going to versions of the page you don't want them too.
It's a lengthy process but it needs to be done.
Danny
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
-
150+ Pages of URL Parameters - Mass Duplicate Content Issue?
Hi we run a large e-commerce site and while doing some checking through GWT we came across these URL parameters and are now wondering if we have a duplicate content issue. If so, we are wodnering what is the best way to fix them, is this a task with GWT or a Rel:Canonical task? Many of the urls are driven from the filters in our category pages and are coming up like this: page04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3F (See the image for more). Does anyone know if these links are duplicate content and if so how should we handle them? Richard I7SKvHS
Technical SEO | | Richard-Kitmondo0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Duplicate page content - index.html
Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
Technical SEO | | Collie
www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?0 -
Duplicate pages problem
The Moz report shows that I have 600 Duplicate pages, How can I locate the problem and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
What is the difference between 301 redirect to 404 vs just 404.
A bunch of pages on my site are set to 301 redirect to our 404 page. Intuitively, I feel like they should all just 404 from the page's url and not redirect to the 404 page. How do I explain to my developer that they should not redirects but should just 404? Is there much of a difference between the redirect first vs 404 first? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gaytravel0 -
Is content important on home page
hi. i am working on a site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am trying to decide if on the second column of my site where it says uk news, if i should keep it the way it is and have content under the picture or should i get rid of the content under the picture and just have the main title. I am wanting to know if the content under the picture is important for google and for the reader or would it be better just to have the title which is h2. any help would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0