Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
-
Hi
I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head.
The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'.
#3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled?
I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have.
Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates.
1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE
-
http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE
-
http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1
What's the best way to handle this?
-
-
I would defiantly not tell Google to ignore parameters since you have pages ranking high with URL parameters in them.
Be careful if you do implement a canonical, because you could end up removing a few good ranking pages since the URL parameter pages are the ones currently ranking best.
Personally i would just ignore these errors since Google has done a pretty good job choosing the best page already.
You could block Rogerbot from crawling parameter pages.
-
Thanks. This is the only solution I can think of too but the information on each of the tabs is actually different, so technically it is a unique page.
That said the likelihood of someone searching for such a specific subset of that data associated with one company or fund is arguably extremely low, which is why i wasn't sure whether to apply a canonical or not, just to reduce the noise.
I suppose another approach is to tell Google to ignore parameter 's' which forms part of the query which loads one of the subsets of data?
Slightly wary of doing that
-
Hi,
The best way to fix this would be to implement the canonical tag, this would stop Google/Rogerbot thinking those pages are duplicated and focus on the URL you specified.
Check this post from Google explaining all about it.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Kyle
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
-
Duplicate content across different domains in different countries?
Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
Geographic site clones and duplicate content penalties
We sell wedding garters, niche I know! We have a site (weddinggarterco.com) that ranks very well in the UK and sell a lot to the USA despite it's rudimentary currency functions (Shopify makes US customers checkout in £gbp; not helpful to conversions). To improve this I built a clone (theweddinggarterco.com) and have faked a kind of location selector top right. Needless to say a lot of content on this site is VERY similar to the UK version. My questions are... 1. Is this likely to stop me ranking the USA site? 2. Is this likely to harm my UK rankings? Any thoughts very welcome! Thanks. Mat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
SEO value of article title content?
I work for an online theater news publisher. Our article page titles include various pieces of data: the title, publication date, article category, and our domain name (theatermania.com). Are all of these valuable from an SEO standpoint? My sense it'd be cleaner to just show the title (and nothing more) on a SERP. But we'll certainly keep whatever helps us with rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Questions about duplicate photo content?
I know that Google is a mystery, so I am not sure if there are answers to these questions, but I'm going to ask anyway! I recently realized that Google is not happy with duplicate photo content. I'm a photographer and have sold many photos in the past (but retained the rights for) that I am now using on my site. My recent revelations means that I'm now taking down all of these photos. So I've been reverse image searching all of my photos to see if I let anyone else use it first, and in the course of this I found out that there are many of my photos being used by other sites on the web. So my questions are: With photos that I used first and others have stolen, If I edit these photos (to add copyright info) and then re-upload them, will the sites that are using these images then get credit for using the original image first? If I have a photo on another one of my own sites and I take it down, can I safely use that photo on my main site, or will Google retain the knowledge that it's been used somewhere else first? If I sold a photo and it's being used on another site, can I safely use a different photo from the same series that is almost exactly the same? I am unclear what data from the photo Google is matching, and if they can tell the difference between photos that were taken a few seconds apart.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lina5000 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
A Begginer. Learning Lots. Need Advice.
About a month ago I took over a SEO for a small RV company here in Florida. My responsibilities include: SEO, Adwords, Video Production, Inventory Update, Newsletters, Social Media, Etc. I feel a little overwhelmed, but we are a small company and we probably won't be hiring more people. I'm weak in some areas and strong in others. In the SEO area I'm weak. My question is, in the SEO area, where should I be focusing most? I break my SEO responsibilities into a couple areas: Keyword Research (A lot of competition) Back-linking Social Media I know there are more. But where should be my main focus, and how should I go about doing it? Website is http://www.floridaoutdoorsrv.com I would kind of like some one to give me an idea of where I am, and what should I do next. SEOMoz has given me a lot of errors and it's little overwhelming. Thanks in advance for the advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Duplicate titles but redirecting anyway (without redirects set up!!!)
Google has done a crawl of my site and is flagging up duplicate titles on my wordpress site. This appears to be due to the face that some posts are tagged in more than one category. I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1