Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
-
Hi there
I have a new client who has two websites:
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nzThey are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content.
What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain.
Thanks in advance.
Laurie
-
Two URLs containing the same content will be considered as duplicated content, do the domain level redirection so that every URL should redirect to the home page of the preferred domain.
-
Hi - thanks for the response.
Do I still need to set up 301 redirects for every page or can I do it server-side for the entire domain? And is this approach better than using the rel=”canonical” link element in the http header tags?
Thanks
L
-
301 Redirect one to the other. That's it that's all.
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 on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Two Different Domains exact same content
Hello, I suspect I know the answer to this but would like to have it confirmed. I have been speaking to a company the last couple of weeks who have 2 domains with the exact same content. Possible a third but they haven't supplied a link. This from all I've read would be a huge problem for ranking and SEO. What would be the best way to deal with this ? I did do a search and found articles/questions on same content on the same site and in articles etc but nothing about exactly the same websites on 2 domains. Cheers David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | techdesign0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Duplicating an existing website - new name and reskin
Would re-skinning, duplicating an exising ecommerce website with a new domain name cause any ranking issues? The plan would be that all product data, pricing info etc would be identical, the site would have a minor redesign to change colours, logos etc and all duplicate content would be rel=canonicaled to the original site. In case you are wondering the reason for this is a customer with an existing site wants to try out a new brand without incorporating a massive development costs. The majority of traffic would be driving through google shopping, a bit of PPC, social etc. Is this site duplication likely to harm the original site or will setting up rel=canonical to point to the original site going to be sufficient enough to prevent this happening? Is there anything else is should consider? Many thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
How to deal with competition with a similar domain name as my client website?
How can I deal with other websites that have a keyword domain name similar to my client website? I get a few domains similar to my client domain name just to avoid the same issue, but there are a few others ranking for the same keywords and I don't want posible customers get confused with a similar domain name. I have social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and etc), but they are not ranking on the first page. This is the situation: www.domain.com that would be my client's domain. And the competition: www.bestdomain.com www.thedomain.com www.domaincomapany.com And a few more. At this time my client is ranking #1 position, but all the others ar 1 or 2 positions bellow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0
