How to fix duplicate content errors with Go Daddy Site
-
I have a friend that uses a free GoDaddy template for his business website. I ran his site through Moz Crawl diagnostics, and wow - 395 errors. Mostly duplicate content and duplicate page title
I dug further and found the site was doing this:
URL: www.businessname.com/page1.php
and the duplicate: businessname.com/page1.php
Essentially, the duplicate is missing the www. And it does this 2 hundred times. How do I explain to him what is happening?
-
Does your friend have FTP access? If he/she does, then put a 301 redirect from the one you want to rank to the other. Having a site with "www" and without is actually having 2 pages with the same content, something you can easily fix by redirecting the entire domain to the other with a 301 response.
If he/she does have FTP access, look for the .htaccess file and put the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=businessname.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://businessname.com/$1 [R=301,L]Remember to change "businessname.com" with the actual domain name.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Duplicate content on charity website
Hi Mozers, We are working on a website for a UK charity – they are a hospice and have two distinct brands, one for their adult services and another for their children’s services. They currently have two different websites which have a large number of pages that contain identical text. We spoke with them and agreed that it would be better to combine the websites under one URL – that way a number of the duplicate pages could be reduced as they are relevant to both brands. What seamed like a good idea initially is beginning to not look so good now. We had planned to use CSS to load different style sheets for each brand – depending on the referring URL (adult / Child) the page would display the appropriate branding. This will will work well up to a point. What we can’t work out is how to style the page if it is the initial landing page – the brands are quite different and we need to get this right. It is not such an issue for the management type pages (board of trustees etc) as they govern both identities. The issue is the donation, fundraising pages – they need to be found, and we are concerned that users will be confused if one of those pages is the initial landing page and they are served the wrong brand. We have thought of making one page the main page and using rel canonical on the other one, but that will affect its ability to be found in the search engines. Really not sure what the best way to move forward would be, any suggestions / guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks Fraser .
Technical SEO | | fraserhannah0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
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 -
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 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0