Duplicate content
-
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are:
www.domainname/directory-name/
www.domainname/directory-name/index.php
All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page.
Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
Here's some code from an htaccess file I've used before that solves the issue you've got with index.php at the end of all your urls:
#remove /index.php and ensure admin works okay
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
notice the line that contains ^/administrator , in Joomla, admin login is usuall on http://site.com/administrator/index.php
so, removing the index.php from the admin url would prevent any access to the admin screens! If your cms has a similar url, be sure to replace 'administrator' with the relevant url.
-
Hi Ade,
Thanks for all your help.
I will post a new question on the Q&A Forum regarding the .htaccess rule.
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
That one is a bit beyond me I'm afraid and I am not familiar with WebEdition at all.
With most CMS there are normally either built-in or add-on extensions to help with re-writing your urls but you need to be really careful that you don't end up with a completely new set of urls that don't match either of your originals.
A .htaccess rewrite rule may be your best option but I don't know what the coding for it would be.
-
We are using a CMS, its called WebEdition, is there a technical question i should ask them in what i need to do?
Kind Regards
-
Ahhhh. No definitely not practical, I thought that it was just the one url.
Are you using a content management system for your site such as Joomla?
-
Do you think that's practical to do that?
As i will need to do a 301 on literally every page if i don't want to show the /index.php
Is this what seomoz.org website does? for example:
-
In that case you can just add a 301 redirect in to your .htaccess file below the code you added earlier.
redirect 301 /football-teams/index.php http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
-
Hi Ade,
Yes, i tested http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams//index.php however it did not resolve to http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
Any ideas?
-
Hi Gary.
Have you tried visiting the url http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php to see if it now resolves to http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ ?
If it does then the issue is fixed, the next time SEOMoz crawls your site the error will dissapear.
Cheers.
Ade.
-
Hi Ade,
Thanks for the speedy reply.
I have now implemented this and works fantastic on the http://www.mydomain.com/
Thank you very much.
There is another issue however, i hope i can make sense here, here goes:
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's
http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php
I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean.
What would be best practice to fix this issue?
Kind Regards
-
Hey Gary.
Here's the solution that I use.
All my sites are hosted on a linux server so this won't be relevant if your site is hosted on a windows server.
1. create/modify your .htaccess file in your site's root directory.
2. Add the following code to the top of the file:-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]This will ensure that any requests sent to http://yourdomain.com are redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com and that the index.php part of the url is removed.
If you need more help on creating or modifying your .htaccess file then you can find more info here - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html
All the best.
Ade.
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
-
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Duplicate Content on Navigation Structures
Hello SEOMoz Team, My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains. Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects. We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google. It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites. Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other? Thanks, Richard Robbins
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001 -
E-Commerce Duplicate Content
Hello all We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL! 😞 Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc. I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential? I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects? Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow! Cheers Todd
Technical SEO | | toddyC0