Duplicate Content
-
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress).
so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way.
thanks
-
Greg
Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything
"Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different."
Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag.
"Remove the tags"
By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index.
"If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages."
You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages.
Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused.
Thanks again!
-Dan
-
Justin
Sorry to hear of your trouble with making the new settings. For one, my guide on SEOmoz about setting up WordPress for SEO should be helpful. I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with that.
In these cases - the "duplicate content" is usually not the page its self but rather usually just the title tags.
This is because, imagine you have tag archives like this;
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/2/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/3/
Usually the title tags respectably end up being the same;
- Pink Elephants | My Domain
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 2
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 3
For every single tag "subpage".
Normally, the protocol would be to;
- Noindex subpages
- Noindex tags
- Noindex dated archives
- Disable author archives (single author blog only)
- Index categories
You can still link to tag pages and use tags within the site all you want, but you just don't want to index them.
These are just default settings. Its impossible to know exactly what you should be doing without seeing your site, but I hope all of that gets you in the right direction!
-Dan
-
You should only no-follow your tags and archives and not your categories...
In the plugin settings, under permalinks, there is an option
"Strip the category base (usually
/category/
) from the category URL." this will just stop the duplicate pages from appearing,Blocking the category's must have caused the drop.
Greg
-
Changed to Yoast. I ticked no follow on archives, categories, and tags. One hour later, website went from #7 to page four.
-
Well, the duplicate content is causing issues alone.. Google does not like duplicate pages at all...
If you select which are your primary pages, and tell google to ignore the rest, it can only help your ranking.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, all you need to do is set tags to no-follow and no-index, and also strip the category from the URL. (it redirects automatically, as well)
Greg
-
Thanks for the reply. Would this affect ranking or can it be left alone ?
-
Wordpress does this when you use tags....
Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different.
2 Options that i can think of.
1.) Remove the tags and strip the category segment in the URL and stop using them in future. This will require redirects from duplicate URL"s to the main article (this will take planning, allot of time and is quite complicated)
2.) If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages. This tells Google were the original page can be found. Tags are only their for user experience so you can set these to no-follow and no-index.
Greg
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 Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
What to do with old website still online & duplicate content
I launched a new wordpress site at www.cheaptubes.com in Sept. I haven't taken the old one down yet, it is still at http://65.61.43.25/ The reason I left it up is I wanted to make sure everything was properly redirected 1st. Some pages and images are still ranking but most point to the new site. When I search for carbon nanotubes pricelist and look in images I see some of our images on the old site are still ranking there https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://65.61.43.25/images/single-walled-nanotubes.1.gif&imgrefurl=http://65.61.43.25/ohfunctionalizedcnts.htm&h=359&w=451&tbnid=HKlL84A_9X0jGM:&docid=N2wdCg7rSQBsjM&ei=-A2qVqThL4WxeKCyjdAM&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwikvcWdxczKAhWFGB4KHSBZA8oQMwhJKCIwIg I guess I can put WP on the old server and do some 301s from there but I'm not sure if that is best or if I should just kill it off entirely? My rankings took a hit on Nov 15th and business has been bad ever since so I'm trying to figure this out quickly. Moz.com and onpage.org both say my site has duplicate content on several pages. I've looked at the content and it isn't duplicate. How can I figure this out? Google likely see's it the same way. These aren't duplicate pages, they are different products. I even searched my product pages to make sure I didn't have 2 of each in there and I don't. With Moz its mostly product tags it sees as duplicate but the products are completely different
Technical SEO | | cheaptubes0 -
Javascript tabbed navigation and duplicate content
I'm working on a site that has four primary navigation links and under each is a tabbed navigation system for second tier items. The primary link page loads content for all tabs which are javascript controlled. Users will click the primary navigation item "Our Difference" (http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference) and have several options with each tabs content in separate sections. Each second tier tab is also available via sitemap/direct link (ie http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference/Tree-Logistics) without the js navigation so the content on this page is specific to the tab, not all tabs. In this scenario, will there be duplicate content issues? And, what is the best way to remedy this? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
Duplicate title/content errors for blog archives
Hi All Would love some help, fairly new at SEO and using SEOMoz, I've looked through the forums and have just managed to confuse myself. I have a customer with a lot of duplicate page title/content errors in SEOMoz. It's an umbraco CMS and a lot of the errors appear to be blog archives and pagination. i.e. http://example.com/blog http://example.com/blog/ http://example.com/blog/?page=1 http://example.com/blog/?page=2 and then also http://example.com/blog/2011/08 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=1 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=2 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=3 (empty page) http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=4 (empty page) This continues for different years and months and blog entries and creates hundreds of errors. What's the best way to handle this for the SEOMoz report and the search engines. Should I rel=canonical the /blog page? I think this would probably affect the SEO of all the blog entries? Use robots.txt? Sitemaps? URL parameters in the search engines? Appreciate any assistance/recommendations Thanks in advance Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0