Duplicate content and http and https
-
Within my Moz crawl report, I have a ton of duplicate content caused by identical pages due to identical pages of http and https URL's.
For example:
http://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations
https://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations
The strange thing is that 99% of these URL's are not sensitive in nature and do not require any security features. No credit card information, booking, or carts. The web developer cannot explain where these extra URL's came from or provide any further information.
Advice or suggestions are welcome! How do I solve this issue?
THANKS MOZZERS
-
Hard to tell without knowing the site, but it's possible there are external links to "https" versions of the pages. At this point, Google is going to increase the pressure to secure sites, and later this year Chrome will start warning users about all non-secure pages, so it may be worth making the move.
-
I'm reading this response and this is happening on my site as well. How did this happen in the first place? I have duplicate content because of https and http copies of all my web pages. If I type https://www.mywebsite.com I can't get to my site. Could this be coming from my hosting company? I've set up my site to simply be http://www.mywebsite.com. I'm a little worried to change my robots.txt and I would love to know how this happened in the first place.
-
If Google detects both http: and https: versions, they've started to automatically pick the https: version, but that's not consistent yet. In general, I think it's still important to set strong canonicalization signals. Google still separates your http: and https: sites in Google Search Console, too, so even they haven't quite made up their minds.
In general, Google is pushing sites toward https:, but that's a somewhat complex decision that depends on more than just SEO. If you're using https: and the https: URLs are indexed, then you should treat those as canonical and suppress the http: URLs, in most cases.
-
Hate to respond to a 3 year old thread. But does this solution needs to be updated?
Is there any change in response now, as Google is favoring https for most pages. Does google still consider http and https as two different sites? If so which one should be suppressed - http or https?
Aji
-
Hi,
I'm still having problems with redirecting. I only have 1 duplicate page with https and http, that I want to redirect but it's the homepage.
i want to redirect: https://www.domain.com to http://www.domain.com
But keep the rest of the pages the same (half http and the other half https).
How do i do this?
-
Anytime Rand! I only have two simple rules:
1. Talking business on ski days is not allowed
2. Entry into Vermont requires a pound of Seattle's best french roast coffee. In return, you receive some fantastic Vermont maple syrup.
Simple rules to live by LOL
Thanks again for all of your help...
Peter
-
Thanks dude! If I make it to Vermont, I might look you up
-
Thanks James..
Sorry, I was using Big Company as an example and just being generic.
The real URL if interested is www.hawkresort.com
-
I would personally like to thank everyone that responded with an answer. Man O Man, the best part of belonging to SEOMOZ is the community forum. It's incredibly valuable, being able to ask a question and reach out to such talent as all of you.
If anyone ever gets up to Killington or Okemo skiing, the beer is on me! I live right between both ski areas, about 8 miles to either mountain..
Thanks again.
-
I think Harald and James covered the bases here, but a couple of comments on Harald's reply:
(1) Definitely check this. A common cause of indexed https: pages is that a secure section of your site is being crawled (like a shopping cart), and you're using relative navigation links (like ) - when a crawler or visitor hits the nav link from a secure page, the relative link grabs the https: In most cases, you may want to NOINDEX secure pages. Shopping carts and checkout pages have no business in the search index, IMO.
[(2)-(5) I believe this does work, but it's very tricky, so please be careful. If anyone has linked to the https: pages, you'll lose the link-juice this way (you'll just cut those pages off). I honestly don't think it's a good choice for most sites.
(8) I actually believe the 301-redirect is simpler in most cases.
As James said, sitewide canonical tags (or on the affect pages, if they're isolated) will also work.](/contact.php)
-
Hi Serge, I came to know about the "robots_ssl.txt" from the website http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/robots-and-https.html
-
I would check your server for a https folder.
add a robots.txt file in the root of the https folder:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/My guess is that the spider is following a link somewhere within your site that links to a https:// url. The spider is than re-indexing the entire site using https://
My 2 cents for what its worth.
-
Harald, " robots_ssl.txt " where did you get that?
-
Hello Hawkvt1, Fisrt of all I want to tell you that the protocols (http/https) are different, they are considered two separate sites, so there’s a good chance to get penalized for duplicate content. If the search engine discovers two identical pages, generally it would take the page it saw first and ignore the other pages.The solutions are described below:
S__olutions:
- Be smart about the site structure: to keep the engines from crawling and indexing HTTPS pages, structure the website so that HTTPs are only accessible through a form submission (log-in, sign-up, or payment pages). The common mistake is making these pages available via a standard link (happens when you are either ignorant or not aware that the secure version of the site is being crawled and indexed).
- Use Robots.txt file to control which pages will be crawled and indexed
- Use.htaccess file. Here’s how to do this:
- Create a file names robots_ssl.txt in your root.
- Add the following code to your .htaccessRewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443 [NC]RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt [L]
- Remove yourdomain.com:443 from the webmaster tools if the pages have already been crawled
- For dynamic pages like php, try< ?phpif ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == 443){echo “< meta name=” robots ” content=” noindex,nofollow ” > “;}?>
- Dramatic solution (may not always be possible): 301 redirect the HTTPS pages to the HTTP pages – with hopes that the link juice will transfer over.
For more information please refer to this link :
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https
I'm sure that your problem is solved.
-
You could implement the canonical tag onto the HTTP version of the website.
Another problem when having a quick look at this website is that all your title tags are the same with the brand term at the front, this is not advisable at all you want to put the brand term at the end of the title and your generic terms first.
I would look at getting an SEO audit done to fix the issues with the website.
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
-
Shopify Duplicate Content in products
Hello Moz Community, New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites. Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/ Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-teardrop-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-orca-silver-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/silver-oval-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-spirit-silver-earrings As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate. So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content? Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold? Or another solution that I may not be aware of. Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise! Sean
Technical SEO | | TheUpdateCompany1 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Duplicate content on user queries
Our website supports a unique business industry where our users will come to us to look for something very specific (a very specific product name) to find out where they can get it. The problem that we're facing is that the products are constantly changing due to the industry. So, for example, one month, one product might be found on our website, and the next, it might be removed completely... and then might come back again a couple months later. All things that are completely out of our control - and we have no way of receiving any sort of warning when these things might happen. Because of this, we're seeing a lot of duplicate content issues arise... For Example... Product A is not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productA will return no results... Product B is also not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productB will also return no results. As per Moz Analytics, these are showing up as duplicate content because both pages indicate "No results were found for {your searched term}." Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to return a 204 in these situations (which I don't know if a 204 would help anyway) or a 404, because, for a faster user experience, we simultaneously render different sections of the page... so in the very beginning of the page load - we start rendering the faster content (template type of content) that says "returning 200 code, we got the query successfully & we're loading the page".. the unique content results finish loading last since they take the longest. I'm still very new to the SEO world, so would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help with this... I'm stuck. 😛 Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
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 -
Is there ever legitimate near duplicate content?
Hey guys, I’ve been reading the blogs and really appreciate all the great feedback. It’s nice to see how supportive this community is to each other. I’ve got a question about near duplicate content. I’ve read a bunch of great post regarding what is duplicate content and how to fix it. However, I’m looking at a scenario that is a little different from what I’ve read about. I’m not sure if we’d get penalized by Google or not. We are working with a group of small insurance agencies that have combined some of their back office work, and work together to sell the same products, but for the most part act as what they are, independent agencies. So we now have 25 different little companies, in 25 different cities spread across the southeast, all selling the same thing. Each agency has their own URL, each has their own Google local places registration, their own backlinks to their local chambers, own contact us and staff pages, etc. However, we have created landing pages for each product line, with the hopes of attracting local searches. While we vary each landing page a little per agency (the auto insurance page in CA talks about driving down the 101, while the auto insurance page in Georgia says welcome to the peach state) probably 75% of the land page content is the same from agency to agency. There is only so much you can say about specific lines of insurance. They have slightly different titles, slightly different headers, but the bulk of the page is the same. So here is the question, will Google hit us with a penalty for having similar content across the 25 sites? If so, how do you handle this? We are trying to write create content, and unique content, but at the end of the day auto insurance in one city is pretty much the same as in another city. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | mavrick0 -
Duplicate content
Greetings! I have inherited a problem that I am not sure how to fix. The website I am working on had a 302 redirect from its original home url (with all the link juice) to a newly designed page (with no real link juice). When the 302 redirect was removed, a duplicate content problem remained, since the new page had already been indexed by google. What is the best way to handle duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shedontdiet0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850