Bad Duplicate content issue
-
Hi,
for grappa.com I have about 2700 warnings of duplicate page content. My CMS generates long url like: http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria=latest_news/idsottocat=5 and http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria%3Dlatest_news/idsottocat%3D5 (this is a duplicated content).
What's the best solution to fix this problem? Do I have to set up a 301 redirect for all the duplicated pages or insert the rel=canonical or rel=prev,next ?
It's complicated becouse it's a multilingual site, and it's my first time dealing with this stuff.
Thanks in advance.
-
Your original question had two URLs, one of where the "=" was replaced with "%3D". If that was an actual crawled URL (and not a copy-and-paste error), then it's likely coming from bad links within your own site. That's malformed, so you should definitely check it out. A desktop crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog could help track down the culprit:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog
-
Thanks Peter for the reply!
What do you mean by "bad internal links" ?
I'm well ranked so based on your suggestions what I have to do is to set up properly the rel=canonical tag and rel=alternate, right? I'm still bit scarred about duplicate content report in the SEOmoz campaign. 2.700 warnings is kind of a big deal.
-
One of these URLs just seems to be the encoded version of the other, which should appear as identical. I'm not seeing any evidence that Google is indexing both. I have a feeling that you may have some bad internal links that need to be fixed. I'm seeing the English/German version of this page in the index, but that should be fine. As Khem said, you could use .
Be careful about converting to a "static" version. It's not that it's a bad idea, but the problem is that you could end up turning 2 duplicates into 3 duplicates. You'll still have to canonicalize the dynamic version to the static version. In other words, done badly, changing your URLs could actually make the problem worse.
-
Rel=prev/next is for paginated series, such as internal search results. While I see you have a pagination parameter on these pages ("idpagina=13"), it doesn't seem like this is a series or that the two pages are even duplicates. I'm a bit confused on the intent, but my initial reaction is that rel=prev/next doesn't fit the bill here.
-
As long as you are managing a multilingual site, it is always recommended to use rel="alternative" even if you're redirecting your website.
For next, prev, don't use, unless you feel it is really required, as I could not find the need May be I missed something, could you be please bit more specific?
-
Thanks Raj! I will for sure re-write the dynamic urls into static and that's a starting point. Take for example these pages:
http://www.grappa.com/eng/grappa.php/argomento=grappa_in_italy/idsezione=1/idpagina=13
Do you suggest in this case to use rel=nex, prev ?
I thought about using rel="alternate" for the multilingual issue, but now my site redirects automatically from www.grappa.com to www.grappa.com/eng/index.php. is that bad for SEO? Should I put rel="canonical" to www.grappa.com ?
Many thanks
-
Hey Nicola, ~2700 is a huge no.
I would suggest you to talk to you programmer/developer to re-write the dynamic URLs into static, which I am sure they can easily do.
second thing, make sure to delete all the duplicate pages or use rel=unfollow. using 301 for all the duplicate pages is not a bad option but not a permanent solutions. It is better to re-write all the dynamics urls into static one, delete all the dups pages and then 301 redirect all the deleted pages to the originals.
for multilingual you can use the following code:
The tag enables you to say, “This is for Spain. this is for Germany
The rel="alternate" hreflang="es" annotations help Google serve the Spanish language or regional URL to searchers
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
-
To what extent is content considered unique or duplicate?
I work primarily on classifieds websites and an issue I consistently come across are two or more URLs which have the exact same ad count, due to site structure and the way everything is categorized. An example of such would be with these two pages: https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/motorboats/princess https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/boats-for-sale/princess/power These two have the exact same number of ads- would search engines mark these as duplicate content? Both have different meta descriptions, title tags etc. but essentially the MC is exactly the same. If they are, what would be the best course to remedy the problem? I'm skeptical about using canonical tags as I generally use them for exact duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
How bad is it to have duplicate content across http:// and https:// versions of the site?
A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice? Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Good morning, Our developers have recently created a new site for our agency. The site is responsive for mobile/tablets. I've just put the site through Screaming Frog and I've been informed of duplicate H2s. When I've looked at some of the page sources, there are some instances of duplicated H2s and duplicated content. These duplicates don't actually appear on the site, only in the code. When I asked the development guys about this, they advised this is duplicated because of the code for the responsive site. Will the site be negatively affected because of this? Not everything is duplicated, which leads me to believe it probably could have been designed better... but I'm no developer so don't know for sure. I've checked the code for other responsive sites and no duplicates can be found. Thanks in advance, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Duplicate content /index.php/ issues
I'm having some duplicate content issues with Google. I've already got my .htaccess file working just fine as far as I can tell. Rewriting works great, and by using the site you'd never end up on a page with /index.php. However I do notice that on ANY page of the site you could add /index.php and get the same page i.e.: www.mysite.com/category/article and www.mysite.com/index.php/category/article Would both return the same page. How can I 301 or something similar all /index.php pages to the non index.php version? I have no desire for any page on my site to have index.php in it, there is no use to it. Having quite the hard time figuring this out. Again this is basically just for the robots, the URL's the users see are perfect, never had an issue with that. Just SEOMOZ reporting duplicate content and I've verified that to be true.
Technical SEO | | b18turboef1 -
Duplicate Content based on www.www
In trying to knock down the most common errors on our site, we've noticed we do have an issue with dupicate content; however, most of the duplicate content errors are due to our site being indexed with www.www and not just www. I am perplexed as to how this is happening. Searching through IIS, I see nothing that would be causing this, and we have no hostname records setup that are www.www. Does anyone know of any other things that may cause this and how we can go about remedying it?
Technical SEO | | CredA0 -
Duplicate Content Caused By Blog Filters
We are getting some duplicate content warnings based on our blog. Canonical URL's can work for some of the pages, but most of the duplicate content is caused by blog posts appearing on more than 1 URL. What is the best way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Marketpath0 -
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