Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
-
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
-
Yep, this one I fixed just now as you send it.
I think the issue with wrong redirects is mostly me not spotting them all rather than a problem with the ones I already set not redirecting correctly.
I expect there to be thousand + wrong pages, but when I use site:domain.tld and a word in wrong language, for instance "evg" (french word for bachelor party) Google spots only up to 300 (suspiciously the same maximum amount for all sites).
-
Hey Rasmus - I honestly think it's an issue with the redirects. I would double check them.
I did just visit https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/ and it looks like it's redirecting. Were you able to get those shored up? If you are still having trouble, I would contact your web host to make sure those are shored up.
-
Hi John
Yes, the idea is that https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/ should redirect to a german equivalent where we have one.
It's strange that it isn't as it has not been more than a week since I uploaded all the redirects. Perhaps this is down to the site: search not providing all results, and perhaps if it's limiting the amount of results, when some are removed, it starts showing others that were not showing before?
-
Hey Rasmus,
Just so I understand - a url like this: https://www.pissup.de/package/basic-survival-4/, should not be displaying on the german site. The german site should just have german right?
I found that page doing the site search listed in your initial question.
What's interesting is that this page isn't redirecting. Let me know your thoughts. I have feedback but I want to make sure of a few things before I share it.
Thanks!
John
-
Hi John
Thanks for taking your time to answer!
The URL's were already showing 301 or 404 when we discovered them after launching new site
What we did so far was this:
- set up 301 redirect from pissup.com/german-url to pissup.com/english-equivalent where available or closest similar page
- added a sitemap with these URL's with the hope they'd be crawled faster
- Wait
We were advised it was better to redirect than to ask for removal. Do you disagree with this advice, and what makes you think so?
We're really seeing an increase yet for these issues in the SERPS. Some decrease by 5-10%, but some don't. Can it be because we are not seeing them all in SERPS, and in that case is there anywhere else we could find them (all url's indexed by google on our domain)?
-
Hey Rasmus,
In finding these index pages, I'm assuming that you did the following:
1. no-indexed the pages from the domain you are concerned about
2. dis-allowed them in robots.txt (just another step to help speed up things)
3. Used the URL removal tool in Google Search Console
Unfortunately, it does take time for Google to process these URL's out of the SERPS. Hopefully, you are seeing a decrease in the URLs shown in the SERPS
Also, don't forget to do this via the Bing Search Console too!
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 For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
What is considered duplicate content?
Hi, We are working on a product page for bespoke camper vans: http://www.broadlane.co.uk/campervans/vw-campers/bespoke-campers . At the moment there is only one page but we are planning add similar pages for other brands of camper vans. Each page will receive its specifically targeted content however the 'Model choice' cart at the bottom (giving you the choice to select the internal structure of the van) will remain the same across all pages. Will this be considered as duplicate content? And if this is a case, what would be the ideal solution to limit penalty risk: A rel canonical tag seems wrong for this, as there is no original item as such. Would an iFrame around the 'model choice' enable us to isolate the content from being indexed at the same time than the page? Thanks, Celine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
I'm updating content that is out of date. What is the best way to handle if I want to keep old content as well?
So here is the situation. I'm working on a site that offers "Best Of" Top 10 list type content. They have a list that ranks very well but is out of date. They'd like to create a new list for 2014, but have the old list exist. Ideally the new list would replace the old list in search results. Here's what I'm thinking, but let me know if you think theres a better way to handle this: Put a "View New List" banner on the old page Make sure all internal links point to the new page Rel=canonical tag on the old list pointing to the new list Does this seem like a reasonable way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Duplicate content issue - online retail site.
Hello Mozzers, just looked at a website and just about every product page (there are hundreds - yikes!) is duplicated like this at end of each url (see below). Surely this is a serious case of duplicate content? Any idea why a web developer would do this? Thanks in advance! Luke prod=company-081
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
prod=company-081&cat=20 -
Getting backlinks without content marketing
Hey i have a client who currently has a large ecommerce store with over 50,000 hits a months. I've made the recommendation that they should consider adding a blog and invest in content activities. However they won't be able to do so for quite some time. In the mean time what are some ways i can get backlinks (whitehat only). I'm thinking guest posting on high DA blogs and sites is the best bet. Also sponsorship, CSR activties, and the occasional press release. Can anyone recommend any other ways, or methods i can use to obtain good quality links, or articles which discuss this topic. Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0