Duplicate content and URL's
-
Hi Guys,
Hope you are all well.
Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy
I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes.
Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL.
Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page?
Thank you for your help guys your legends!!
Cheers
Wayne
-
That's a good point.
Does your CMS allow you to updaet the URL of an existing page? If it does, I would recommend doing this (rather than recreating the pages) and then making sure you have a static rewrite setup for that page. This is pretty easy to do in Apache and IIS (there are plent of guides available through Google)
-
Well, you're probably going to have to take the hit at some point, so might as well do the redirects sooner rather than later.
Doing a 301 redirect from the (presumably) old urls to the new you will lose some of the link juice (and I come down on the high end of the spectrum and say you lose 10%, others say less).
You'll also take a bit of a ranking hit while Google indexes the new URLs and repositions you. I've seen this take about 3 - 4 weeks, though could be longer. To aid here make sure and submit a new sitemap as soon as you're done.
Also, while you shouldn't pay attention to such things, remember that your toolbar PR is URL specific, so when you change them you will have all PR0 pages. These should come back after the next update, but they are few and far between. The background PR calculations will still be taking place and should steady themselves long before the toolbar is updated.
As for having to change the URLs, is there a possibility of rewriting them in apache? e.g. is the form site/page?parameter=category¶meter=pagename
So ultimately, yes you will take a bit of a knock, but overall it probably needs done and if you build from it then you should be able to recover and improve much more easily.
-
I recently did a similar thing on my site. I created a redirect (301) for all pages on the site. I then crated all new pages with exactly the same content using a friendly URL.
I didn't notice any drop in traffic or ranking (in fact it increased), but this was for a fairly small site in a not-overly competetive niche.
It is normal for 301 redirects to cause a temporary drop in ranking, but this should be gained wback within a coule of weeks and in my experience exceed because you now have nice seo friendly urls.right
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
-
"Yet-to-be-translated" Duplicate Content: is rel='canonical' the answer?
Hi All, We have a partially internationalized site, some pages are translated while others have yet to be translated. Right now, when a page has not yet been translated we add an English-language page at the url https://our-website/:language/page-name and add a bar for users to the top of the page that simply says "Sorry, this page has not yet been translated". This is best for our users, but unfortunately it creates duplicate content, as we re-publish our English-language content a second time under a different url. When we have untranslated (i.e. duplicate) content I believe the best thing we can do is add which points to the English page. However here's my concern: someday we _will_translate/localize these pages, and therefore someday these links will _not _have duplicate content. I'm concerned that a long time of having rel='canonical' on these urls, if we suddenly change this, that these "recently translated, no longer pointing to cannonical='english' pages" will not be indexed properly. Is this a valid concern?
Technical SEO | | VectrLabs0 -
Duplicate Content Brainstorming
Hi, New here in the SEO world. Excellent resources here. We have an ecommerce website that sells presentation templates. Today our templates come in 3 flavours - for PowerPoint, for Keynote and both - called Presentation Templates. So we've ended up with 3 URLS with similar content. Same screenshots, similar description.. Example: https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/social-media-keynote-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/social-media-powerpoint-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/presentation-templates/social-media-presentation-template I know what you're thinking. Why not make a website with a template and give 3 download options right? But what about https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/ https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/ These are powerfull URL's in my opinion taking into account that the strongest keyword in our field is "powerpoint templates" How would you solve this "problem" or maybe there is no problem at all.
Technical SEO | | slidescamp0 -
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Wordpress tags and duplicate content?
I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content. Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
ECommerce Site, URL's, Canonical and Tracking Referral Traffic
I'm very, very new to eCommerce websites that employ many different URL's to track referral traffic. I have a client that has 18 different URL's that land on the Home Page in order to track traffic from different referral sources. For example: http://erasedisease.com/?ref=abot - Tracks traffic from an affiliate source http://erasedisease.com/?ref=FB01 - Tracks traffic from a FB Ad http://erasedisease.com/?ref=sas&SSAID=289169 - Tracks more affiliate traffic ...and the list goes on and on. My first question is do you think this could hinder our Google rankings? SEOMoz Crawl doesn't show any Duplicate Content Errors, so I guess that's good. I've just been reading a lot about Canonical Url's and eCommerce sites, but I'm not sure if this is a situation where I'd want to use some kind of canonical plugin for this Wordpress website or not. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!!
Technical SEO | | Linwright0