How to remove hundreds of duplicate pages
-
Hi - while i was checking duplicate links, am finding hundreds of duplicates pages :-
-
having undefined after domain name and before sub page url
-
having /%5C%22/ after domain name and before the sub page url
-
Due to Pagination limits
Its a joomla site - http://www.mycarhelpline.com
Any suggestions - shall we use:-
-
301 redirect
-
leave these as standdstill
-
and what to do of pagination pages (shall we create a separate title tag n meta description of every pagination page as unique one)
thanks
-
-
Okay, I took a look at the plugin Ben recommended, and took another look at the SH404SEF one. The free one Ben recommended (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef/1063) looks like it can help out with some duplicate content - but what I recommend doing is getting the SH404SEF here http://anything-digital.com/sh404sef/features.html because it allows for setting up canonical tags and also gives you the option to add the rel=next feature to your paginated pages, which is one of your problem areas.
One thing I noticed though is that it specifically states it "automatically adds canonical tags to non-html pages" - so that means it will apply it automatically to Joomla's defaul pdf view, etc. While this is helpful, it may not solve the full issue of your duplicate pages with the undefined and "/%5C%22/" issue.
It does however state that it "removes duplicate URLs" - how it identifies and removes these, I am not sure. You may want to try it out because it is useful for other optimization tasks - or contact the owner for more information.
If the tool doesn't recognize and remove the duplicate pages caused by /undefined/ and "/%5C%22/" then you should disallow crawling of these in your robots.txt file. While you are in your robots.txt file you should remove the /images/ because you want those to be crawled - Joomla adds that in by default.
Because a lot of these pages have already been crawled, you should do a 301 on the duplicate pages to their matching page. This sounds like it will be a long process - this may be aided by the sh404sef plugin - not sure.
I just want to also add that I am in no way affiliated with any of these plugins.
-
The only way to solve the duplication error you are getting is to make the URL's distinct. Googlebot comes to your site and looks at the URL's and if they are not distinct it may not index them very well. I understand your site is showing up fine in the SERP's so this may be one of those items you place on a lower priority until later.
I think R.May knows Joomla so I'll refer to him on how to accomplish this but it may be worth it to make the adjustment. You may find the end result of making your page URL more distinct will actually increase your current SERPs. Just a thought.
Other than that. If your site isn't hurting and the only thing you are concerned about is the report in SEOmoz then I would move on and just make a mental note of it for later.
-
Hi ben - changing url is not well required as the site is getting good serp, however - the duplicacy issue to saveguard us from any future issue - is what we seek for
-
Hi - thanks for replying
-
For the dynamic url - Yes - at the initial start - it was missed and as on its not reqd somehow - as the pages are getting indexed well and good in SERP
-
For pagination - Where we needs this is like in our used car section, discount section& news section where multiple pages are created. shall we create separate title & meta description for every pagination page. is it ideally reqd ?
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_usedcar&view=category&Itemid=3
- 'undefined' & /%5C%22/ is coming as per report of SEOmoz and is almost on every page of site (except of home page) with the dynamic url after domain name are preceded with these 2 strings as per moz report
how to get this corrected - want to be preventive from this duplicacy n avoid getting a hit in future even if its going well now -
-
-
I'm not a Joomla expert but to make your URL's search engine friendly you are going to need to add an extension like this. That will allow you to make more distinct URLs that will not be considered "duplicate" anymore.
-
Joomla has soo many dup content issues, you have to know Joomla really well to avoid most of them. The biggest issue is you didn't enable the SEF URLs from the start and left the default index.php?option=com on most of them, which stuffs your URLs full of ugly parameters.
You can still enable this in your global options and with a quick edit to htaccess - but it will change all of your current URLs and you will need to 301 all of them, so that isn't a great option unless you are really suffering - and depending on if you are using J 1.6 or under, this is a time consuming nasty process. Also this is unlikely to get rid of any existing duplicate pages - but may make dealing with them and finding them easier.
I don't see the specific examples you posted though, where are you seeing "undefined" and "%5C%22/ " ?
You should implement rel=canonical on the correct version of each page. I recommend SH404SEF which is a Joomla plugin and makes this process easier - but it isn't free. I don't know of a good free plugin that does this, and Joomla's templates make doing this manually difficult.
Looking at it quickly, I also didn't notice any articles that were paginated, but you should try to follow the rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated pages. This is likely something you will have to edit your Joomla core files to do.
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
-
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Parent pages
Hi guys, A website has many venue pages, for example: www.example.com/venue/paris For some reason the parent www.example.com/venue/ is 301 redirecting to a minor page elsewhere on the website. Should I remove the 301 redirect and then create www.example.com/venue/ page that then links to all the venues? My thinking is: Google will expect there to be a /venue/ 'parent' page So if the parent page is redirecting to a minor page elsewhere within the website its telling Google all the venues like paris must be even less important. Should I do it? Any suggestions from fellow SEOMoz's would be appreciated! All the best Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0