Duplicate content vs. less content
-
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to.
In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content.
Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content.
Thanks for your help. Erik
-
|
This is from seomoz crawl report. mostly all of it is forum and user profiles.
Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57 Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57-0
|
WA Jer | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wa-jer wavekitegirl | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wavekitegirl White Abbot | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/white-abbot |
|
-
The -0 is Drupal's way of handling duplicate page titles, duplicate file names etc. You may indeed have an issue where two "nodes" are being generated. If this is the case you are basically creating a competitor for yourself.
Do you want to share the site and two URL's that are duplicated?
-
Thank your for the responses. We have a popular ride board that is awesome, and some buy and sell... other than that most of our forum has moved to our Facebook page. About 1/3 of the duplicate content has a -0 after the title. I am not sure how to take it out from the robots.txt file.
i guess the heart of my questions is I have always thought that all the content from the forum would help us in SEO. Is it possible that it is really hurting us? How does google look at a site that has a ton of pages ( we are an old site that keeps all of our content so folks can search it, old surf reports...) but a ton of errors and duplicate content. How much will solving errors and duplicate content help vs. just working on more links? Where do i focus energy?
-
Don't take down a forum if it has an active community, instead focus on the canonical control of the forum. Depending on your Drupal set-up this could be tricky to implement. That being the case then you could always block Googlebot's access to the duplicated pages then remove the URLs from the index through GWT. The last option would be to review your Drupal template and insert a PHP conditional statement to issue a noindex,follow command in the robots meta tag, for certain pages. Look at the URLs and see if there's a pattern as to which pages are the 'duplicates' and try to match that pattern. Hope something here helped.
-
_I am assuming that you are referring internal duplicate content issue. In that case, I would rather suggest you to fix them by adding canonical or by adding noindex Meta data or by specifying some rules in robots.txt file. No need to remove the forum if it is adding value to user experience. However, if you feel that your forum is getting ruled by spammers and trolls, you should take down the whole thing. I hope that it would do good to your website in the long run. _
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 w/ same URLs
I am getting high priority issues for our privacy & terms pages that have the same URL. Why would this show up as duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RanvirGujral0 -
Removed .html - Now Get Duplicate Content
Hi there, I run a wordpress website and have removed the .html from my links. Moz has done a crawl and now a bunch of duplicated are coming up. Is there anything I need to do in perhaps my htaccess to help it along? Google appears to still be indexing the .html versions of my links
Technical SEO | | MrPenguin0 -
Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Duplicate Content Errror
I am getting a duplicate content error for urls for the "tags" or categories pages for my blog. These are some the URLs that SEOmoz is saying are errors, or duplicate pages. http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=Facebook http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=content+marketing http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=inbound+marketing As you can see, they are just the pages that are aggregating certain blog post based on how we tagged them with the appropriate category. Is this really a problem for our SEO, if so any suggestions on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | TalkingSheep0 -
What is the best practice to handle duplicate content?
I have several large sections that SEOMOZ is indicating has duplicate content, even though the content is not identical. For example: Leather Passport Section - Leather Passports - Black - Leather Passposts - Blue - Leather Passports - Tan - Etc. Each of the items has good content, but it is identical, since they are the same products. What is the best practice here: 1. Have only one product with a drop down (fear is that this is not best for the customer) 2. Make up content to have them sound different? 3. Put a do-no-follow on the passport section? 4. Use a rel canonical even though the sections are technically not identical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
How critical is Duplicate content warnings?
Hi, So I have created my first campaign here and I have to say the tools, user interface and the on-page optimization, everything is useful and I am happy with SEOMOZ. However, the crawl report returned thousands of errors and most of them are duplicate content warnings. As we use Drupal as our CMS, the duplicate content is caused by Drupal's pagination problems. Let's say there is a page called "/top5list" , the crawler decided /top5list?page=1" to be duplicate of "/top5list". There is no real solution for pagination problems in Drupal (as far as I know). I don't have any warnings in Google's webmaster tools regarding this and my sitemap I submitted to Google doesn't include those problematic deep pages. (that are detected as duplicate content by SEOMOZ crawler) So my question is, should I be worried about the thousands of error messages in crawler diagnostics? any ideas appreciated
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Htm vs. aspx page extensions & duplicate content
We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the URLs include keywords?
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0 -
Duplicate content
I have to sentences that I want to optimize to different pages for. sentence number one is travel to ibiza by boat sentence number to is travel to ibiza by ferry My question is, can I have the same content on both pages exept for the keywords or will Google treat that as duplicate content and punish me? And If yes, where goes the limit/border for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | stlastla0