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
-
Affiliate Url & duplicate content
Hi i have checked passed Q&As and couldn't find anything on this so thought I would ask.
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
I have recently noticed my URLS adding the following to the end: mydomain.com/?fullweb=1 I cant seem to locate where these URLS are coming from and how this is being created? This is causing duplicate content on google. I wanted to know ig anyone has had any previous experience with something like this? If anyone has any information on this it would be a great help. thanks E0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
301 redirecting old content from one site to updated content on a different site
I have a client with two websites. Here are some details, sorry I can't be more specific! Their older site -- specific to one product -- has a very high DA and about 75K visits per month, 80% of which comes from search engines. Their newer site -- focused generally on the brand -- is their top priority. The content here is much better. The vast majority of visits are from referrals (mainly social channels and an email newsletter) and direct traffic. Search traffic is relatively low though. I really want to boost search traffic to site #2. And I'd like to piggy back off some of the search traffic from site #1. Here's my question: If a particular article on site #1 (that ranks very well) needs to be updated, what's the risk/reward of updating the content on site #2 instead and 301 redirecting the original post to the newer post on site #2? Part 2: There are dozens of posts on site #1 that can be improved and updated. Is there an extra risk (or diminishing returns) associated with doing this across many posts? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | djreich0 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
How much of an issue is it if a site is somehow connected to a site that was penalized by Google?
I am working with someone that is about to launch a new site, and one of the sites was affected by the Panda update. Does it matter if the two sites are connected? Share the same hosting provider and same Google Webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique. Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently? I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue? Thanks Brian Clapp
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Duplicate Content Penalties, International Sites
We're in the process of rolling out a new domestic (US) website design. If we copy the same theme/content to our International subsidiaries, would the duplicate content penalty still apply? All International sites would carry the Country specific domain, .co.uk, .eu, etc. This question is for English only content, I'm assuming translated content would not carry a penalty.
Technical SEO | | endlesspools0