Duplicate content warnings
-
I have a ton of duplicate content warnings for my site poker-coaching.net, but I can't see where there are duplicate URLs. I cannot find any function where I could check the original URL vs a list of other URLs where the duplicate content is?
-
thanks for the help. I am trying to cover all bases here. Duplicate content was one concern, the other one is too high link density and bad incoming links.
I have downloaded a full backlinks report now using Majestic SEO (OSE only shows incoming links from 74 domains...).
I think I may have found the problem. I used to have a forum on that domain years ago which was hacked and used for a lot of spammy outgoing links for stuff like Cialis, Viagra etc.. Those guys also linked from other sites to my forum pages. Example:| from: http://www.grupoibira.com/foro/viewto...
| Anchor: buy flagyl in lincolnu... | 3 | to: http://www.poker-coaching.net/phpbb3/...
|
When I closed the forum and deleted the forum plugin, I redirected all forum pages to my main page which, under the circumstances was a bad mistake I guess. Because with the redirect, all those spammy links now end up pointing to my main page, right? So first, I have removed that redirect now.
But the problem remains that I still have plenty of links from spam sites pointing to URLs of my domain that do not exist any more.
Is there anything else I can do to remove those links or have Google remove/disregard them, or do you think a reconsideration request explaining the situation would help? -
Honestly, with only 235 indexed pages, it's pretty doubtful that duplicate content caused you an outright penalty (such as being hit with Panda). Given your industry, it's much more likely you've got a link-based penalty or link quality issue in play.
You do have a chunk of spammy blog comments and some low-value article marketing, for example:
http://undertheinfluence.nationaljournal.com/2010/02/summit-attendees.php
A bit of that is fine (and happens in your industry a lot), but when it's too much of your link profile too soon, you could be getting yourself into penalty territory.
-
Hey There,
Just to clarify, to see the source of those errors, you’ll need to download your Full Crawl Diagnostics CSV and open it up in something like Excel. In the first column, perform a search for the URL of the page you are looking for. When you find the correct row, look in the last column labeled referrer. This tells you the referral URL of the page where our crawlers first found the target URL. You can then visit this URL to find the source of your errors. If you need more help with that, check out this link: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20895376-crawl-diagnostics-csv
Hope that helps! I will look at the issue on the back end to see if they are actually duplicate content.
Have a great day,
Nick
-
Thanks for looking into this. Actually I checked the whole site by doing a batch search on Copyscape and there were only minor duplicate content issues. I resolved those by editing the content parts in question (on February 24th 2012).
Since I am desperately searching for the reasons why this site was penalized (and it def is...), it would be great to know why your duplicate content checker finds errors. Could only be related to multiple versions of one page on different URLs. I do have all http://mysitedotcom redirected to www.mysitedotcom, and the trailing slash/notrailingslash URL problem was also resolved by a redirect long ago, so I do not know where the problem lies.
Thanks for the help! -
I think our system has roughly a 90-95% threshold for duplicate content. The pages I'm seeing in your campaign don't look that high, so something is up - I'm checking with support.
For now, use the "Duplicate Page Title" section - that'll tend to give you exact duplicates. The duplicate content detection also covers thin content and near duplicates.
-
Yes that is what I first thought too. If only it were that easy.
But when I do, I see a couple of URLs that definitely do not have any duplicate content . Could it be that the dupe content check considers text in sitewide modules (like the modules "Poker News" and "Tips for ...." in www.poker-coaching.net) as duplicate content, because they appear on all pages?
This way, the duplicate content finding function is totally worthless. -
If you drill down into your campaign report into 'Crawl Diagnostics' you will see a dropdown menu that's named "Show". Select 'Duplicate Page Content'... you will see a graph with a table below it. To the right of the URL you will see a column named "Other URL's". The numbers in that column are live links to a page with the list of URL's with duplicate content. At least that is how it is displayed in my campaigns.
-
You will find this information at google webmaster tools and at seomoz campaing. There you will the information you need.
One easy way to avoid this is to include the rel canonical metag. You need to include in every page (pages you want to be the official one) inside the head tag the follow:
where ww.example.com/index.html is your page adress. Good luck!
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
-
Metadata and duplicate content issues
Hi there: I'm seeing a steady decline in organic traffic, but at the same time and increase in pageviews and direct traffic. My site has about 3,000 crawl errors!! Errors are duplicate content, missing description tags, and description too long. Most of these issues are related to events that are being imported from Google calendars via ical and the pages created from these events. Should we block calendar events from being crawled by using the disallow directive in the robots.txt file? Here's the site: https://www.landmarkschool.org/
Reporting & Analytics | | BGR0 -
Backlinks or content? What is the problem here?
My Moz ranking is 29, Ahrefs Domain rank is 49 and Majestic Citation flow is 44 whereas trust flow is 17. This is a plain question - If the above are the rankings for backlink problem, then where is the problem more likely to be found? Backlink or content? In more detail - My site has been dropping in search since the last few weeks. With these rankings, is it likely that a backlink related problem is there? I myself agree that some content is poor and thin and there is a problem of plagiarism also. But overall, do i keep focusing on content? I do not know how good are these rankings as shown above. My URL is www.marketing91.com Please let me know whether the backlink profile looks good or not? So that at least i am not worried that there is a backlink problem as well. (i will surely work on toxic links soon) I can worry only on content.
Reporting & Analytics | | marketing910 -
Google Analytics is treating my blog like all the content is just on the home page.
Hello all, I installed Google Analytics on a main website and a blog (blog.travelexinsurance.com) While it appears to be tracking correctly (and when I test it in real time it shows that I'm visiting) but it is treating the entire blog as though it's one page. So I can't see data on blog post X. All I see is that X visitors came to my blog in aggregate. So I see blog.travelex.com has 999 visitors, but it doesn't show that /travel-luggage got 50 visits, while /insurace-tips got 75 and so forth. I assume I screwed up the tracking somehow, but can't figure out where I went wrong. Tracking on the main domain works just fine. It's specific to the blog.
Reporting & Analytics | | Patrick_G0 -
Fresh Content Still As important?
We have an internal debate, that perhaps y'all can help us resolve. In the past "freshness" of content has been important, correct? (Google's QDF for example) In the past (to present) when we build a site with the intent to SEO the site, we build the core pages with the expectation that we will be adding more site pages as the project progresses, thus settling the "fresh content" factor. But it has been proposed to us, from a client, that completely building the site out with all the pages you hope to rank, getting the upfront bang for your buck. The expectation is that the traffic soars right-off. Now the client says that he has been doing this for years and has not been affected by any alog changes. (although we have not seen proof of this from him) So our question is this: Is it better to provide a website full of fresh content at the beginning of the project, for a jumpstart on traffic, then leave the site alone ( for the most part) or Is it better to have core pages of fresh content at the start, and build out new pages from their, so the website remains fresh every month? And can you prove your argument? (we need cold hard facts to be convinced 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Strange Traffic / Viewed content in Analytics
Hi Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views) How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ? Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ? Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ? All Best Dan ps - also many above average home page views
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
What is the best way to eliminate this specific image low lying content?
The site in question is www.homeanddesign.com where we are working on recovering from some big traffic loss. I finally have gotten the sites articles properly meta titled and descriptioned now I'm working on removing low lying content. The way there CMS is built, images have their own page (every one that's clickable). So this leads to a lot of thin content that I think needs to be removed from the index. Here is an example: http://www.homeanddesign.com/photodisplay.asp?id=3633 I'm considering the best way to remove it from the index but not disturb how users enjoy the site. What are my options? Here is what I'm thinking: add Disallow: /photodisplay to the robots.txt file See if there is a way to make a lightbox instead of a whole new page for images. But this still leaves me with 100s of pages with just an image on there with backlinks, etc. Add noindex tag to the photodisplay pages
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
How serious are the Duplicate page content and Tags error?
I have a travel booking website which reserves flights, cars, hotels, vacation packages and Cruises. I encounter a huge number of Duplicate Page Title and Content error. This is expected because of the nature of my website. Say if you look for flights between Washington DC and London Heathrow you will at least get 60 different options with same content and title tags. How can I go about reducing the harm if any of duplicate content and meta tags on my website? Knowing that invariably I will have multiple pages with same content and tags? Would appreciate your advice? S.H
Reporting & Analytics | | sherohass0 -
Duplicate page content
I have a website which "houses" five different and completely separate departments, so the content is separated by subfolders. e.g. domain.com/department1 domain.com/department2 etc. and each have their own individual top navigation menus. There is an "About Us" section for each department which has about 6 subpages (Work for us, What we do, Awards etc.) but the problem is that the content for each department is exactly the same. The only difference is the navigation menu and the breadcrumbs. This isn't ideal as a change to one page means having to make the change to all 5 and from an SEO perspective it's duplicate content x5 (apart from the Nav). One solution I can see is to have the "About Us" section moved to the root level (domain.com/about-us) and have a generic nav, possibly with the department names on it. The only problem with this is that it disrupts the user journey if they are forced away from the department that they're chosen. Basically i'm looking for suggestions or examples of other sites that have got around this problem, I need inspiration! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | haydennz0