Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
-
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance
Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html
another example
Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/
same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com
i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one???
thanks very much
-
Thanks Tim. Do you have any examples of what those problems might be? With such a large catalog managing those rel canonical tags will be difficult (I don't even know if the store allows them, it's a hosted store solution and little code customization is allowed).
-
Hi there AspenFasteners, in this instance rather than a .HTAccess rule I would suggest applying a rel canonical tag which points to the page you deem as the original master source.
Using the robots to try and hide things could potentially cause you more issues as your categories may struggle to be indexed correctly.
-
We have a similar problem, but much more complex to handle as we have a massive catalog of 80,000 products and growing.
The problem occurs legitimately because our catalog is so large that we offer different navigation paths to the same content.
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8314.htm
http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Self-Tapping-Sheet-Metal-s/8315.htm
(If you look at the "You are here" breadcrumb trail, you will see the subtle differences in the navigation paths, with 8314.htm, the user went through Home > Screws, with 8315.htm, via Home > Security Fasteners > Screws).
Our hosted web store does not offer us htaccess, so I am thinking of excluding the redundant navigation points via robots.txt.
My question: is there any reason NOT to do this?
-
Oh ok
The only reason i was thinking it is duplicate content is the warnings i got on the moz crawl, see below.
75 Duplicate Page Content
6 4xx Client Error
5 Duplicate Page Title
44 Missing Meta Description Tag
5 Title Element is Too Short
I have found over 80 typos, grammatical errors, punctuation errors and incorrect information which was leading me to believe the quality of the work and their attention to detail was rather bad, which is why i thought this was a possibility.
Thanks again for your time its really appreciated
-
I wouldn't say that they have created two pages, it is just that because you have two versions of the domain and not set a preferred version that you are getting it indexing twice. .HTaccess changes are under the hood of the website and could have simply been an oversight.
-
Hey Tim
Thanks for your answer. It's really weird, other than lazyness on the devs part not to remove old or previous versions of pages?, have you any idea why they would create multiple versions of the same page with different url's?? is there any legit reason like ones severs mobile or something??
Just wondering thanks for replying
-
OK, so in this instance the only issue you have is that you need to choose your preferred start point - www or non www.
I would add a bit of code to your htaccess file to point to your preferred choice. I personally prefer a www. domain. Something like the below would work.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]As your site is already indexed I would also for the time being and as more of a safety measure add canonicals to the pages that point to the www. version of your site.
Also if you have a Google Search Console account, you can select your prefered domain prefix in there. this will again help with your indexation.
Hopefully I have covered most things.
Cheers
Tim
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
-
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche1 -
URL disappeared from the search results
Hey folks, A URL on my webpage that has been climbing in search results ever since has suddenly completely disapeared from the search results and i'm absolutely stuck - no idea what the reason might be. It was ranked #11 for the targeted keyword, than it slightly started dropping down to #14 and #17 after which it completely disappeared, not only for specific targeted keyword, but also for exact name of the product. The URL has vanished from search results. I looked in search console, no particular errors or messages from Google. The only case I might come with is that many URLs are cannonicaly linked to the URL in matter, but i don't assume this might be the case. Does anyone have a suggestion what might the reason why the URL has completely vanished from the search results? Thank you a lot. The URL: http://chemometec.com/cell-counters/cell-counter-nc-200-nucleocounter/ Targeted keyword: 'cell counter'
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chemometec0 -
HELP: What happened to my rankings? No warning from google how to know if i was penalised?
Hi Guys I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains. I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking. I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice. But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword. I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing. I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords. I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case. Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings. The site is also new about 6months new. I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming? Does anyone have any suggestions here? Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
International web site - duplicate content?
I am looking at a site offering different language options via a javascript drop down chooser. Will google flag this as duplicate content? Should I recommend the purchase of individual domains for each country? i.e. .uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com1 -
20-30% of our ecommerce categories contain no extra content, could this be a problem
Hello, About 20-30% of our ecommerce categories have no content beyond the products that are in them. Could this be a problem with Panda? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Using Programmatic Content
My company has been approached a number of times by computer generated content providers (like Narrative Science and Comtex). They are providing computer generated content to a number of big name websites. Does anyone have any experience working with companies like this? We were burned by the first panda update because we were busing boilerplate forms for content
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SuperMikeLewis0 -
How does someone rank page one on google for one domain for over 150 keywords?
A local seo is exclaiming his fantastic track record for a pool company(amonst others) in our local market. Over 150 keywords on page one of google. I checked out a few things using some moz tools and didn't find anything that would suggest that this has come from white hat strategies, tactics or links etc. Interested in how he is doing this and if it is white hat? Thanks, C
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | charlesgrimm0 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0