SEOMoz Internal Dupe. Content & Possible Coding Issues
-
SEOmoz Community!
I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped...
First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point.
Now, the issues I am having:
- I have two sites: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx
A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments).
I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages:
-
Car Financing How It Works
-
A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit
(Please let me know if you could use more examples)
At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords.
All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not!
I could really use some significant help here...
- Both of our sites have a number of access points:
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such.
However, my sites can also be reached via the following:
http://www.federalautoloan.com
http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com
http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx
Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags?
I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details.
Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it!
-
Hey Cyrus,
Thank you very much for the detailed response!
-
Hi Colt,
Looks to me like you're getting a duplicate content errors because your page templates are so large, they are tripping the SEOmoz duplicate content filter, which goes off if more than 95% of your code is similar between 2 pages.
For example, take a look at these 2 URLs.
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Why-Shopping-for-an-Auto-Loan-is-Good.aspx
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Regarding-Dealer-Financing.aspx
With the gazillions of links at the bottom of the two pages, the pages have 98% similar code. (You can check it out yourself with this duplicate content tool) The good news is the TEXT content similarity is less than 40%.
1. Google is more sophisticated than Moz, but it would be a good idea to remove some of those links and put them into categories. If you could get these 100 or so links down to 20, that would be closer to ideal
2. Just a recommendation > most of your text is in a scroll box. I'd reformat your page so that all the text was visible without the box. Not sure if this is hurting you or not, but it seems contrary to best user experience, so I'd be inclined to think Google doesn't look to favorably on it.
3. Noticed you blocked a lot of files in your robots.txt, including your css. Unless you have a very specific reason for keeping Google out of these files, I'd let them crawl as Google uses CSS to render your page to see what content is above and below the fold.
4. Best practices is to redirect non-www to www versions of your site (or vice versa). If you can't do this, a canonical tag will do just as well. But how about redirecting everything WITHOUT the /index.aspx? That would look cleaner in search results.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hello Colt.
You have the joys of a Microsoft webserver.
That means all of these URLs work - and many more:
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CRedit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREdit.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREDit.aspx
It does exactly the same thing if you remove the www.
- duplicate content issues.
Also, if you do this:
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspxZ
- you return a 200 response code and serve up the front page
I didn't find a way to make your server give me a 404
-
As an aside: please feel free to extend any other SEO suggestions you may have my way! I am doing my best to learn the SEO trade... and ANY advice is appreciated.
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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
More internal links pointing to internal page vs homepage
I was looking at our GSC internal links section and I saw that we have 901 internal links going to our compare rates form and 890 going to our homepage. At the end of most of our content I add a call to action to our compare rates form. Is this SEO friendly or should I have more pointing to the homepage and less pointing to our compare rates page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Is This Considered Duplicate Content?
My site has entered SEO hell and I am not sure how to fix it. Up until 18 months ago I had tremendous success on Google and Bing and now my website appears below my Facebook page for the term "Direct Mail Raleigh." What makes it even more frustrating is my competitors have done no SEO and they are dominating this keyword. I thought that the issue was due to harmful inbound links and two months ago I disavowed ones that were clearly spam. Somehow my site has actually gone down! I have a blog that I have updated infrequently and I do not know if it I am getting punished for duplicate content. On Google Webmaster Tools it says I have 279 crawled and indexed pages. Yesterday when I ran the MOZ crawl check I was amazed to find 1150 different webpages on my site. Despite the fact that it does not appear on the webmaster tools I have three different webpages due to the format that the Wordpress blog was created: "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/part2leadershi/", "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/page/91/" and "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/category/competent-leadership/page/3/" What does not make sense to me is why Google only indexed 279 webpages AND why MOZ did not identify these three webpages as duplicate content with the Crawl Test Tool. Does anyone have any ideas? Would it be as easy as creating a massive robot.txt file and just putting 2 of the 3 URLs in that file? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
Interlinking from unique content page to limited content page
I have a page (page 1) with a lot of unique content which may rank for "Example for sale". On this page I Interlink to a page (page 2) with very limited unique content, but a page I believe is better for the user with anchor "See all Example for sale". In other words, the 1st page is more like a guide with items for sale mixed, whereas the 2nd page is purely a "for sale" page with almost no unique content, but very engaging for users. Questions: Is it risky that I interlink with "Example for sale" to a page with limited unique content, as I risk not being able to rank for either of these 2 pages Would it make sense to "no index, follow" page 2 as there is limited unique content, and is actually a page that exist across the web on other websites in different formats (it is real estate MLS listings), but I can still keep the "Example for sale" link leading to page 2 without risking losing ranking of page 1 for "Example for sale"keyword phrase I am basically trying to work out best solution to rank for "Keyword for sale" and dilemma is page 2 is best for users, but is not a very unique page and page 2 is very unique and OK for users but mixed up writing, pictures and more with properties for sale.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0