Entire website is duplicated on 2 domains - what to do?
-
My client's website has 1000+ pages and a Domain Authority of 23.
I have just discovered that the entire site is duplicated on a second domain (main URL = companyname.com - duplicate site URL = company-name.com).
The home page of the duplicate domain has a 301 redirect going to the main domain. However, none of the 1000+ other pages have any redirect set up, so Google is indexing the entire duplicate site. I'm assuming this is a bad thing for SEO.
Duplicate site has a domain Authority of 4, so I'd like to transfer whatever link juice it has, towards the main site.
What's the best thing to do?
Ultimately I think it would be best to delete the duplicate site. So would it be a case of adding a redirect to the htaccess file along the lines of:
redirect company-name.com/?slug? to https://companyname.com/?slug? (I realise this isn't the correct syntax - but is the concept correct?)
Has anyone ever dealt with this successfully?
-
You are correct that you have to delete the duplicate website and set up in the redirects in the htaccess file. Once you have done that I would fetch the home page and other top-level pages to force Google to crawl. This will help with removing the duplicate pages out of Google's index.
Also, make sure they don't have a search console set up for the duplicate webiste with a submitted site map.
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
-
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
SEOMOZ and non-duplicate duplicate content
Hi all, Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content. Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework. Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same. Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason. Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy". Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress). I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not? Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report: http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
Technical SEO | | fretts
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx Thanks for any help people0 -
UK and US Targeting Simultaneously - Domain Setup and Duplicate Content?
I have a site that will be targeting the US and the UK. However, it will need to display slightly different content to the two. Should I use a .co.uk and a .com, or uk.themainsite.com for the UK, or themainsite.com/UK? This is of course setting up multiple country targeting within Google Webmaster Tools. Am I likely to run into duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | james4060 -
Duplicate Title - Shopping Website
My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors. The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc. For example
Technical SEO | | adelemaree
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page? As that would make my catalogue look too small! Thanks in advance0 -
Keyword in Domain or not?
My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0