Duplicate content.
-
Hi there....we're dealing with a duplicate content mess.
We're a franchisor(www.kitchensolvers.com), and each of our franchises have their own landing page. The trouble is, the way the landing pages are set up, it's causing all the links available on the national level of the website to be re-indexed each time for every franchise!
We don't have an in-house developer and was wondering if anyone else has had similar issues and point me in the right direction.
-
Thanks again Bevelwise...you've been extremely helpful. We just signed up for PRO account and it's totally worth it! Awesome resource.
-
A really great write up that Rand did in regards to canonical tags is here in SEOMoz's blog it's from a while back but still relevant today.
-
Thanks for the quick response, Bevelwise....I'll ask our local web guy about this.
The franchise pages are populated dynamically from a MySQL database....I like the idea of adding the canonical info dynamically. Seems like to right way to go! Is there any resources you'd recommend for more info on canonical names?
-
I believe that canonical tags are going to be the answer for you. This would be a per page thing you would need to add, but if you add http://www.kitchensolvers.com/services/"/> on the Services page even if a spider navigates through one of your franchisees sections of the website and this happens: http://www.kitchensolvers.com/RochesterHills/services/ then the canonical tag will tell the search engines that they really need to see this page as http://www.kitchensolvers.com/services/
Depending on how much resources you have you may be able to find a developer who could figure this out and do it dynamically or manually is another option if you don't have a developer available.
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
-
Sitemap and Privacy Policy marked for duplicate content?
On a recent crawl, Moz flagged a page of our site for duplicate content. However, the pages listed are our sitemap and our privacy policy -- both very different: http://elearning.smp.org/sitemap/ http://elearning.smp.org/privacy-policy/ What is our best option to address this issue? I had considered a noindex tag on the privacy policy page, but since we have enabled user insights in Google Analytics we need to have the privacy policy displayed and I worry that putting a noindex on the page would cause problems later.
Web Design | | calliek0 -
Multiple sites using same text - how to avoid Google duplicate content penalty?
Hi Mozers, my client located in Colorado is opening a similar (but not identical) clinic in California. Will Google penalize the new California site if we use text from our website that features his Colorado office? He runs the clinic in CO and will be a partner of the clinic in CA, so the CA clinic has his "permission" to use his original text. Eventually he hopes to go national, with multiple sites utilizing essentially the same text. Will Google penalize the new CA site for plagiarism and/or duplicate content? Or is there a way to tell Google, "hey Google, this new clinic is not ripping off my text"?
Web Design | | CalamityJane770 -
Problems preventing Wordpress attachment pages from being indexed and from being seen as duplicate content.
Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem. Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
Web Design | | SEOguy1
to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.0 -
Parallax, SEO, and Duplicate Content
We are working on a project that uses parallax to provide a great experience to the end user, and we are also trying to create a best case scenario for SEO. We have multiple keywords we are trying to optimize. We have multiple pages with the parallax function built into it. Basically each member of the primary navigation is it's own page, with all subpages built below it using the parallax function. Our navigation currently uses the hashbang method to provide custom URL's for each subpage. And the user is appropriately directed to the right section based on that hashbang. www.example.com/About < This is its own page www.example.com/about/#/history < This is a subpage that you scroll to on the About page We are trying to decide what the best method will be for trying to optimize each subpage, but my current concern is that because each subpage is really a part of the primary page, will all those URL's be seen as duplicate content? Currently the site can also serve each subpage as it's own page as well, so without the parallax function. Should I include those as part of the sitemap. There's no way to navigate to them unless I include them in the sitemap, but I don't want Google to think I'm disingenuous in providing them links that don't exist, solely for the purpose of SEO, but truthfully all of the content exists and is available to the user. I know that a lot of people are asking these questions, and there really are no right answers yet, but I'm curious about everyone else's experience so far.
Web Design | | PaulRonin2 -
Duplicate Content & Canonicals
I am a bit confused about canonicals and whether they are "working" properly on my site. In Webmaster Tools, I'm showing about 13,000 pages flagged for duplicate content, but nearly all of them are showing two pages, one URL as the root and a second with parameters. Case in point, these two are showing as duplicate content: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=3&product_style_id=8&frame_id=63&size=25x20 We have a canonical tag on each of the pages pointing to the one without the parameters. Pages with other parameters don't show as duplicates, just one root and one dupe per listing, So, am I not using the canonical tag properly? It is clearly listed as:Is the tag perhaps not formatted properly (I saw someone somewhere state that there needs to be a /> after the URL, but that seems rather picky for Google)?Suggestions?
Web Design | | sbaylor0 -
Im having duplicate content issues in wordpress
all of my pages are working fine. but i added my sitemap to my footer in my website and when i click on my blog from my footer it takes me to the homepage. so now im having duplicate content for two diff urls. ive tried adding a rel=canonical and a 301 redirect to the blog page but it doesnt resolve the problem. also, when i go to my footer and click blog. after it brings me to the homepage ill try to click on my pages from the original bar at the top of my screen and it will bring me to the right pages. but it will have the same blog url in the search bar even when im on other pages. other than that all of my pages in my footer and in my homepage toolbar work fine. its just that one particular problem with the blog page in the footer and how it stays with the same blog url on every page after i click the blog in the footer. can someone please help. im using yoast and idk if i should disable it or what.
Web Design | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Facebook code being duplicated? (Any developers mind taking a peek?)
I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Multiple Sites, multiple locations similar / duplicate content
I am working with a business that wants to rank in local searches around the country for the same service. So they have websites such as OURSITE-chicago.com and OURSITE-seattle.com -- All of these sites are selling the same services, but with small variations in each state due to different legal standards in the state. The current strategy is to put up similar "local" websites with all the same content. So the bottom line is that we have a few different sites with the same content. The business wants to go national and is planning a different website for each location. In my opinion the duplicate content is a real problem. Unfortunately the nature of the service makes it so that there aren't many ways to say the same thing on each site 50 times without duplicate content. Rewriting content for each state seems like a daunting task when you have 70+ pages per site. So, from an SEO standpoint we have considered: Using the canonocalization tag on all but the central site... I think this would hurt all of the websites SERPs because none will have unique content. Having a central site with directories OURSITE.com/chicago -- but this creates a problem because we need to link back to the relevant content in the main site and ALSO have the unique "Chicago" content easily accessable to Chicago users while having Seattle users able to access their Seattle data. The best way we thought to do this was using a frame with a universal menu and a unique state based menu... Also not a good option because of frames will also hurt SEO. Rewrite all the same content 50 times. You can see why none of these are desirable options. But I know that plenty of websites have "state maps" on their main site. Is there a way to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make our copywriter want to kill us?
Web Design | | SysAdmin190