Duplicate Forum Content
-
HI everyone,
great to be here, absolutely loving everything, please go easy on me I'm quite a noob when it comes to seo, but hopefully my question isn't too basic.
After running the initial checks on my websites, I found there are 7,646 duplicate pages? Some are easy fixes but the majority are not, being forum pages, the edit, quote and new post links are coming up as duplicates of the main post?
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Best Lee
-
How delightful that you refer to Invisionpower as I recently took the software for a test drive and plan to purchase it in January
A question though that has been troubling me. I use a paid for hosting service, which forwards to one of my sub-domains. The problem is I have nearly 7k pages of duplicate content (all from the forum), I really want to add a no follow and then remove the forum pages from the search index and thus remove all of the duplicate content. Though I'm worried that adding no follow to the sub domain may impact on the main site.
I have a lot of page one search positions, many long tails which combined result in a lot of visits, but I also have a couple of short phrases that get 50% of the visits alone, so I can't risk making any changes, actually I'm pretty terrified to make any changes, just in case all of my website pages are removed from the index.
-
invisionpower forum is good choice, as i knew. Found duplicated content pages here, it happens with most of forums, but there is full provision that this can resolved by canonical or stop crawling one you don't want in robots.txt.
-
Hey
just found some valuable info which has solved a lot of my problems, modified .htaccess which has removed all of the non www links, so thats a part solve.
I think what I'm going to do is purchase the new forum software, setup a robot.txt to not crawl the new forums and then once I have all of the posts transfered to the new forum, remove the old forums from the index.
That should solve it, the new forum is very well established and if need be I can pay one of their developers to incorporate some seo feature that will stop the duplicate content issue. Once thats solved I can remove the robot.txt
Many thanks, Lee
-
Hi, still one more thing, because you sound loss, and that's not the meaning of this Q&A. Contact the forumservice and ask for the canonical, this is a very simple and common thing to do.
-
Ok thanks Leonie,
still no nearer to knowing what to do, I know theres a problem and generally what I need to do, but I'm still at a complete loss as to how to do it
But thank you for trying to help,
Best, Lee
-
Seo stuff is'nt that difficult, though it can be comlicated
Anyway I wish you luck with the forum and hope you'll manage to get it the way you wanted.
Grtz, Leonie
-
Mmmm this is becoming more problematic by the minute, will need to implement robot.txt before removing the urls.
And there was me thinking this seo stuff would be easy.
-
Lol, tha'ts also an option
under url's index, though they have to be removed first, otherwise google crawl them again. but there you can remove complete directories at once.
-
or go somewhere else lol, have been considering buying invisionpower forum for a while, this might be the final push I needed.
Is there a way of mass deleting pages from the index in webmaster tools, i.e. all links that contain edit, quote and new ect?
-
Ah okay, that will be difficult than.
Maybe you can ask them to implement the canonical url. It will be helpful for you to avoid duplicates
-
is a paid forum service, but they give you the ability to add code snippets in the head.
-
Hi Lee,
What kind of CMS are you using?
In wmt under parameters you can configure parameters. If the ur's contain the same parameter it is a posibility.
-
Hi Leonie,
thanks for taking the time to answer
Not sure if that will work, there is only one head (hope that makes sense). Forums work pretty much the same as content management systems. I have the ability to change what's contained in the head, but adding rel="canonical" will have the same effect on all pages, even the duplicate one (I think).
Is there a way of removing all pages from the index (in webmaster tools) that contain the word edit, or quote or new? Kind of like using a wild card?
-
Hi Lee,
I'm not very familiar with forums. but i think you can solve it by putting a canonical in the head.
If you have a main page, which is the post, put a canonical url in it:
the duplicate pages need to have the same canonical.
I hope this work for you.
Grtz, Leonie
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
-
Any recommendations on a Content Marketing Firm?
I have used several and had some good results. Am wondering if I can find one that is more cost effective than who I am using now, as they just doubled their prices.
Content Development | | RoxBrock0 -
Community Discussion: Can 10x content be short-form content?
In his (intentionally very short) post on Tuesday, Rand makes the case that long-form content isn't necessarily great content: "Rather than applying a tactic like long-form content universally or setting length as the bar (or even a metric) for greatness, we instead match our content to our audience's needs and our business/personal goals. 700 more words will not help you reach your goals any more than 7 more words. Create content that helps people. Do it efficiently. Never write an ultimate guide where a single image could more powerfully convey the same value. Trust me; your audience and your bottom line will thank you." I think this is something we all struggle with as online marketers, in one way or another. As someone who casually consumes online content on a regular basis, this also resonates with me on a personal level. I'm curious, what are your hesitations with focusing on shorter-form content that packs a wallop, and what excites you about it? Can you think of any examples of content you've come across that you consider 10x short-form content?
Content Development | | Christy-Correll7 -
Product descriptions, when do they become classed as duplicate content, how different do they have to be?
I look after 3 sites which have a lot of crossover on products. We have 1000s of products and I've made it a requirement that we give each it's on description on each of the sites. This sounds like the right thing to but it's very hard for our content writers to write three different versions descriptions, especially when we have variations on the products so potentially writing unique product descriptions for 4-5 very similar products on three separate sites. We've worked very hard to create unique content deep through the site on all categories, subcategories and tag combinations and along with the other SEO work we've done over the last couple of years is producing great results. My question is now far do we have to go? I'm busy writing some product descriptions for a 3rd party site for some of our products, the easy thing to do is just copy and paste but I want Google to see the descriptions as unique. Whilst all SEO advice will say 'write unique descriptions' from a practical point of view this isn't especially useful as there doesn't really seem to be much guidance on how different they need to be. I gather we can't just move around the paragraphs or jumble up sentences a bit but it is easier to work from a description and change it than it is to start from a blank slate (our products range form being very interesting and unique, to quite everyday so sometimes tough to create varied unique content for). Does anyone know of any guidance or evidence of just how clever the Google algorithm is and how close content has to be before it becomes classed as the same or similar? Thanks Pete
Content Development | | PeterLeatherland0 -
Is there a content ratio that google looks for?
What i mean by this is: If i have a 1000 page ecommerce site that has say 10 pages of good quality content (1% good content) and a competitive site that has 100 pages of good content (10% good content) and another that has 500 (50%). if they are all almost the same in every other way the 50% content site would win hands down. however this is not always possible to have so much good content on some types of site. The question is: Is there a min percentage to aim for? Also is there a similar min rate of content production to aim for. Is their a kind of tipping point to get past that google will think they are doing things right i should keep an eye on them!
Content Development | | mark_baird0 -
Duplicate content penalty
Hi there, I'd like to ensure I avoid a duplicate content penalty and could do with some advice. There is a popular blogger in my industry. I have agreed to add his blog to my website. He currently posts his blog on one of the popular free blogger platforms, and will continue to do this. The issue is that I will be posting duplicate content onto my site and I want to ensure that I do not trigger a google penalty. Is there a simple way form me to inform Google of the original source of the content. My intitial thoughts are: 1. Add a noindex to the Robots.txt file 2. Add a link at the beginning of the article pointing to the original source 3. Adding a rel=canonical tag in the header of each blog entry pointing to the original blog post which resides on a completely different domain. Thanks DBC
Content Development | | DBC011 -
Outsource Content Marketing
Hi all I'm wondering whether anyone knows of any good reputable Australian companies that specialise in SEO content marketing? Looking for a company that can manage & produce quality content at scale, while being cost effective. If you've had experience dealing with them, please list the pros & cons of your experience. Thanks.
Content Development | | danng0 -
Is there a tool for measuring content freshness?
i.e. crawling a site to identify last date of new or changed content? Thanks.
Content Development | | PeterTroast0 -
New Magento store with lots of duplicate contect
Hi, I am fairly new to SEOmoz and would really appreciate some pointers. I have just received the results of my first crawl and I have over 1800 pages of duplicate content. this is an example Cream poplin slim fit mens business shirt from Jermyn Street Shirt Co. http://jsshirts.com.au/aylesbury-cream-poplin-slim-fit-shirt.html Heading other URL's indicates 10 My questions are what does this figure 10 represent? what do I need to do to remove this duplicate content. Thanks | | | | |
Content Development | | mullsey
| | | | |
| | | | |0
