I have a duplicate content problem
-
The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?
-
Thanks for the help!
-
Hey Steve,
if you are searching for a good CMS take a look at contao (www.contao.org) a german open source CMS. I run it on a couple of sites such as (www.waescherei-suche.de). It's site-based and has everything out of the box (newsletter, calendar-entries, user management etc.) There are tons of plugins and upgrades for nearly all kind of purposes. If you run a small site with a few pages this might be the thing you are looking for.
Sebastian
EDIT: it's in English..
-
Thank you for helping me through this issue. I was worried I'd be facing a penalty for the duplicate content and am glad to get it corrected. This site has Drupal as it's CMS and it's been a bear trying to change/add/update anything. There are a number of problems with this site - it doesn't show the Description tags even though I have them filled out.You can see this on View Source that there's no Descriptions tags. Any changes I have wanted to make can't be changed like the Facebook button and Alt tags, by me anyway.
I'm working on a new Wordpress website to replace this one with. Again, thank you for your help!
Sincerely,
Steve
-
Hi Steve.
Log into Google WMT and go to the Home page. From there press the "Add a Site" button. You will most likely see the non-www version of your site listed. Add the www version of your site.
Next, go through the process of confirming your site. When your site was originally set up your website developer probably added the code to your web page or web server, so it may already be there. Try to confirm the code without actually adding anything to your site or server. If you receive an error, then go ahead and follow Google's instructions.
Once your site is verified, you will then be able to go to Site Configuration > Settings > Set Preferred Domain.
Decide which version you prefer for your site and stick with it. It looks like you are already set up to use "www" so I would recommend using that URL style unless you had a specific reason to change it.
EDIT: I can't help but offering a bit of feedback regarding your site. These are just suggestions so feel free to disregard any you don't care for:
-
Change the "Facebook" block to the same color as Facebook pages. Your current green color blends in too much with everything else. It needs to stand out and be easy to find.
-
Update your copyright to 2011
-
Add a meta description tag to your pages. This tag wont help you rank better, but it will often be visible to users and may influence whether they click through to your site.
-
Add ALT tags to your images, and try to align your image names with your keywords when possible. Presently they have names such as "teens" where "teen martial arts" might more accurately describe the image, and help you rank better.
You have other opportunities, but the above will help get you moving in the right direction. If you have a chance, I highly recommend reading the SEO Beginners Guide as it contains a lot of great information.
-
-
I would not worry too much about that info. You rank well for a term like "austin tx martial arts" so everything seems good.
On a sitenode: If you ever want to reuse content and check how similar two pages are you could use a service like http://utext.rikuz.com/en/ to test it algorythmically.
Hope this answers your questions.
-
Thank you for your help, but according to the Crawl Dignostics for this website's SEOMoz Campaign, I have 16 pages of duplicate content. Should I discard this info.?
-
A site:pmaaustin.com showed 19 pages indexed. All of which with www.
Calling a non www. version of a page returned
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:16:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.pmaaustin.com/index.php?q=node/18So everythings looks good....
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 - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages
Hi, I have a online shop with categories such as: Trousers Shirts Shoes etc. But now I'm having a problem with further development.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products. How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective? I'm appreciate your suggestions. Best, Robin0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380