Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
-
Hi
Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on.
How would I go about resolving this?
Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
-
Hi! The Moz tool is not being more specific as to what element is a duplicate? (ie: description, title, H1, etc)?
I ran it through Screaming Frog and it only found a few H1s that are a duplicate, which is not even a big issue really.
-
Can you give me an example of the one of your duplicated pages?
-
Moz is flagging up that its the code which is causing the duplicate content?
Is that right?
-
There several way to manage this problem, and all depends of the source of the problem. So let me explain my point and you can see which solution is the right for your case.
Causes for duplicate content
1. URL variations
example:
www.widgets.com/blue-widgets?color=blue is a duplicate of www.widgets.com/blue-widgets2. HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW pages
If your site has separate versions at "www.site.com" and "site.com" (with and without the "www" prefix), and the same content lives at both versions, you've effectively created duplicates of each of those pages. The same applies to sites that maintain versions at both http:// and https://. If both versions of a page are live and visible to search engines, you may run into a duplicate content issue.3. Scraped or copied content
Content includes not only blog posts or editorial content, but also product information pages. Scrapers republishing your blog content on their own sites may be a more familiar source of duplicate content, but there's a common problem for e-commerce sites, as well: product information. If many different websites sell the same items, and they all use the manufacturer's descriptions of those items, identical content winds up in multiple locations across the web.How to fix duplicate content issues
Fixing duplicate content issues all comes down to the same central idea: specifying which of the duplicates is the "correct" one.Whenever content on a site can be found at multiple URLs, it should be canonicalized for search engines. Let's go over the three main ways to do this: Using a 301 redirect to the correct URL, the rel=canonical attribute, or using the parameter handling tool in Google Search Console.
SOLUTIONS
301 redirect
In many cases, the best way to combat duplicate content is to set up a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the original content page.
Rel="canonical"
Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.
Meta Robots Noindex
One meta tag that can be particularly useful in dealing with duplicate content is meta robots, when used with the values "noindex, follow." Commonly called Meta Noindex,Follow and technically known as content=”noindex,follow” this meta robots tag can be added to the HTML head of each individual page that should be excluded from a search engine's index.
**IN SUMMARY **
There are many option to deal with this problem, if you are running wordpress you can use the SEO yoast plugin to mark as a NO INDEX the pages that you want to exclude another alternative can be use some redirect plugin and redirect the wrong pages to the right pages or even you can use your htaccess file to modify your redireccions. As you mention much of the problem might be caused for dummy content pages so the firts step could be identify those pages, create a list and then you can redirect or exclude those pages. Make sure that you have been properly the site settings of your site www and non www version
for more information you check this links
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/wordpress-duplicate-content-problems-fixes.html
https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/
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 issue on Magento platform
We have a lot of duplicate pages (600 urls) on our site (total urls 800) built on the Magento e-commerce platform. We have the same products in a number of different categories that make it easy for people to choose which product suits their needs. If we enable the canonical fix in Magento will it dramatically reduce the number of pages that are indexed. Surely with more pages indexed (even though they are duplicates) we get more search results visibility. I'm new to this particular SEO issue. What do the SEO community have to say on this matter. Do we go ahead with the canonical fix or leave it?
Technical SEO | | PeterDavies0 -
Best Way to Handle Near-Duplicate Content?
Hello Dear MOZers, Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem. Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar. As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course. Add 150+ more words to each description text block Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page Any other options or suggestions? Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages. Thank you folks, Ethan
Technical SEO | | BernsteinMedicalNYC0 -
Query Strings causing Duplicate Content
I am working with a client that has multiple locations across the nation, and they recently merged all of the location sites into one site. To allow the lead capture forms to pre-populate the locations, they are using the query string /?location=cityname on every page. EXAMPLE - www.example.com/product www.example.com/product/?location=nashville www.example.com/product/?location=chicago There are thirty locations across the nation, so, every page x 30 is being flagged as duplicate content... at least in the crawl through MOZ. Does using that query string actually cause a duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | Rooted1 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Errror
I am getting a duplicate content error for urls for the "tags" or categories pages for my blog. These are some the URLs that SEOmoz is saying are errors, or duplicate pages. http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=Facebook http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=content+marketing http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=inbound+marketing As you can see, they are just the pages that are aggregating certain blog post based on how we tagged them with the appropriate category. Is this really a problem for our SEO, if so any suggestions on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | TalkingSheep0 -
Duplicate Content Issue with
Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James
Technical SEO | | JamesPiper0 -
Paginated Home Page Duplicates on Wordpress Sites
A number of my websites created on WP are displaying duplicate home pages with these types of urls. http://www.example.com/page/10/ http://www.example.com/page/11/ http://www.example.com/page/12/ I found these duplicates using the site:search command. Basically, put in any number and the Home Page opens. With the above mentioned url structure. Any idea on why they are created, how they can be stopped and what kind of an impact they would have in terms of SEO and the penalty that comes with duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | AsadMemon1 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050