Is this duplicate content?
-
My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs
For example:
is the same article as:
I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ...
Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not..
if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome!
Thanks
-
Agreed - although I think a 301-redirect or canonical tag implementation would probabyl be ok. If there's a database lookup that can translate the DocID into a URL string, the canonical is easy (I write some CF code, so I can at least tell you it's doable). Keep in mind that "article.cfm" is only one template, so if you can find a solution that's data-driven, it's just as easy for 1,000 pages as it is for 10.
You could also create a dynamic 301-redirect via <cfheader>- the core logic is the same. Basically, you look up the URL from the DocID and dynamically create the tag. You just need someone who understands your CMS and data. The actual code is only a few lines, but understanding your setup is the time-consuming part.</cfheader>
-
ATMOS, those are just the same page, so Canonical tag should do it, but also you want to stop google indexing it, so you could detect that it is called with the article.cfm and use a no index META tag too, but not if it uses the friendly url
-
I mostly agree with kchan.
- It is considered duplicate content.
- Simplest way is to do rel canonical for the pages with ids.
However, I suspect 301 redirect is not the best way. Especially, if your website is using Omniture and/or Google web analytics code, you might get miscalculated traffic through them because of 301 redirect.
Be careful if you choose the last route.
-
Awesome Chan, thanks. That was my thought as well. Most difficult part will be determining how to get that script in place.
-
Any chance you can spend a little time writing it out?
My guess is that we should be doing a rel canonical tag on all the article.cfm?intDocID=22572 type pages, that would then direct the bots to our /bc-blazes-construction-trail. But what's the easiest way to do that across the whole site?
-
Hello,
It sure is duplicate content. By putting "/article.cfm" into the robot.txt won't work because if you do that you are just re-directing the whole folder. You need to do a permanent re-direct. I had a brief look at the site and it seems like there are over 1000+ pages. This might take a while but it is neccessary to do it, if not your clients rankings will not perform and most likely penalised. A simple way would be doing a canonical link in /article.cfm?intDocID=22572 so you are showing google the main article is located at /bc-blazes-construction-trail.
However, the best way would be doing a 301 permanent re-direct of course. I'm sure you could get a web dev to write a script to automatically run through the database and output the re-directs than manually re-directing 1000+ pages. If it can't be done, you could outsource it on freelancer.com for around $2-300.
Thanks
-
That would definitely be considered duplicate content. There are a few things you can do to fix it, but rather than wasting a bunch of time writing it out here I would recommend visiting the link below for more detailed info:
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Duplicate Page Content Errors on Moz Crawl Report
Hi All, I seem to be losing a 'firefighting' battle with regards to various errors being reported on the Moz crawl report relating to; Duplicate Page Content Missing Page Title Missing Meta Duplicate Page Title While I acknowledge that some of the errors are valid (and we are working through them), I find some of them difficult to understand... Here is an example of a 'duplicate page content' error being reported; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com (which is obviously our homepage) Is reported to have 'duplicate page content' compared with the following pages; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/guides/gratuities http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/holland-america-2014-offers/?order_by=brochure_lead_difference http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/about-us/meet-the-team/craig All 3 of those pages are completely different hence my confusion... This is just a solitary example, there are many more! I would be most interested to hear what people's opinions are... Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing2 -
Duplicate blog content and NOINDEX
Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0 -
Is this will post Duplicated Content
I have domain let say abcshoesonlinestore.com and inside pages of this abcshoesonlinestore.com is ranking very well such as affiliate page, knowledgebase page and other pages, HOWEVER i would like to change my home page and product page to shorter url which abcshoes.com and keep those inside page like www.abashoesonlinestore.com/affiliate or www.abcshoesonlinestore.com/knowledgebase as it is - will this pose duplicate content? This is my plan to do it: the home page and product page will be www.abcshoes.com and when people click www.abcshoes.com/affiliate it will redirect 301 to abcshoesonlinestore.com/affiliate HOWEVER if someone type abcshoesonlinestore.com or abcshoesonlinestore.com/product it will redirect to abcshoes.com or its product page itself (i want to use 302 instead 301 (ASSUMING if the homapage or product page have manual penalization or anything bad we want to leave it behind and start fresh JUST assume because i read some post that 301 will carry any bad thing to new site too) The reason i do not want to 301 from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com is because those many pages is ranking top 3 in GOOGLE ( i worry will lose this ranking since this bringing traffic for us) Is this good idea or bad idea or any better idea or should i try to see the outcome 🙂 - the only concern is from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com will pose as duplicate content if i do not use 301 - or can i use google webmaster tools to remove the home page and product page for abcshoesonlinestore.com can we tell google that? PS: (home page and product page will have new revise content and minor design change) but inside page will stay the same design Please give me some advise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | owen20110