Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
-
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June.
On Bing I am like 9th
On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows
Original: www.playpokeronline.ca
Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/
this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy.
for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools
I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page
visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month.
Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site.
Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty?
Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else?
This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time
Thank You
Jeb
-
What this looks like to me is somone has published your site to a virtual directory within your site.
this is easy to do with a IIS server. can you log in and see the file structre or the iis control panel?
-
Thanks - that was a huge amount of information - very comprehensive. I will wait a few days and hopefully as the site is re crawled over the next 30 days things improve. Unfortunately with my site the extra folder was a ghost of my entire site and i do believe (hope) that the rel = canonical may be the best solution. Thanks for the answers!
-
Hi John,
Dr. Pete made a very comprehensive post to the SEOmoz blog this week about duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of the problems you are facing and options for solutions.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
James is right except what concerns me is your mention of blocking the pages in robots.txt. That was a mistake. By doing such Google will never see your canonical tag.
This issue is not likely GoDaddy's fault, but rather some aspect of the site was not properly configured. By far the best solution would be to fix the root issue. Remove the duplicated pages. If that cannot happen for some reason, a lesser solution would be to add the canonical tag to the duplicated pages and refer them back to their primary page.
-
Give it a few days for the rel canonical to kick in, it is not going to fix the problem over night. If that does not work you can try and switch duplicant content to sub domains on the website, or make unique content on these pages.
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 analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
Self inflicted duplicate content penalty?
Wondering if I could pick the brains of fellow mozer's. Been working with a client for about 3 months now to get their site up in the engine. In the three months the DA has gone from about 11 to 34 and PA is 40 (up from about 15) so that's all good. However, we seem not to be moving up the ranking much. The average DA of competitors in the niche in the top ten is 25. We have 9.2 times the average no of backlinks too. During a call to the client today they told me that they noticed a major drop in their rankings a few months back. Didn't say this when we started the project. I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!! Clearly something is not right here. Looking into this, I seems that someone has use their content, word for word, as the descriptions on thousands of blogs, social sites. I am thinking that this, tied in with the slow movement in the listings, has caused a duplicate content penalty in the search engines. The client haven't copied anyone's content as it is very specific for their site but it seems all over the web. I have advised them to change their site content asap and hope we get a Panda refresh in to view the new unique content. Once the penalty is off i expect the site to shoot up the rankings. From an seo company point of view, should I have seen this before? Maybe. If they had said they suffered a major drop in rankings a few months back - when they dropped their seo agency, I would have looked into it, but one doesn't naturally assume that a client's copy will be posted all over the web, it is not something I would have searched for without reason to search Any thoughts on this, either saying yes or no to my theory would be most welcome please. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Sites for English speaking countries: Duplicate Content - What to do?
HI, We are planning to launch sites specific to target market (geographic location) but the products and services are similar in all those markets as we sell software.So here's the scenario: Our target markets are all English speaking countries i.e. Britain, USA and India We don't have the option of using ccTLD like .co.uk, co.in etc. How should we handle the content? Because product, its features, industries it caters to and our services are common irrespective of market. Whether we go with sub-directory or sub-domain, the content will be in English. So how should we craft the content? Is writing the unique content for the same product thrice the only option? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)
Hi All, I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”. The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them). Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory. From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages. Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is. We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages? Has Google simply determined this one to be the original? What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page? Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Justin
Technical SEO | | JustinGeeks0 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php
Technical SEO | | RouteAccounts0