Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
-
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June.
On Bing I am like 9th
On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows
Original: www.playpokeronline.ca
Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/
this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy.
for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools
I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page
visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month.
Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site.
Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty?
Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else?
This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time
Thank You
Jeb
-
What this looks like to me is somone has published your site to a virtual directory within your site.
this is easy to do with a IIS server. can you log in and see the file structre or the iis control panel?
-
Thanks - that was a huge amount of information - very comprehensive. I will wait a few days and hopefully as the site is re crawled over the next 30 days things improve. Unfortunately with my site the extra folder was a ghost of my entire site and i do believe (hope) that the rel = canonical may be the best solution. Thanks for the answers!
-
Hi John,
Dr. Pete made a very comprehensive post to the SEOmoz blog this week about duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of the problems you are facing and options for solutions.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
James is right except what concerns me is your mention of blocking the pages in robots.txt. That was a mistake. By doing such Google will never see your canonical tag.
This issue is not likely GoDaddy's fault, but rather some aspect of the site was not properly configured. By far the best solution would be to fix the root issue. Remove the duplicated pages. If that cannot happen for some reason, a lesser solution would be to add the canonical tag to the duplicated pages and refer them back to their primary page.
-
Give it a few days for the rel canonical to kick in, it is not going to fix the problem over night. If that does not work you can try and switch duplicant content to sub domains on the website, or make unique content on these pages.
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Duplicate content
Hello mozzers, I have an unusual question. I've created a page that I am fully aware that it is near 100% duplicate content. It quotes the law, so it's not changeable. The page is very linkable in my niche. Is there a way I can build quality links to it that benefit my overall websites DA (i'm not bothered about the linkable page being ranked) without risking panda/dupe content issues? Thanks, Peter
Technical SEO | | peterm21 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I just had my site crawled by the seomoz robot and it came back with some errors. Basically it seems the categories and dates are not crawling directly. I'm a SEO newbie here Below is a capture of the video of what I am talking about. Any ideas on how to fix this? Hkpekchp
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
Duplicate content
I'm getting an error showing that two separate pages have duplicate content. The pages are: | Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Registrar Register4Less, Inc. http://register4less.com/faq/cache/11.html 1 27 1 Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Register4Less Reseller (Tucows) http://register4less.com/faq/cache/7.html | These are both registration agreements, one for us (Register4Less, Inc.) as the registrar, and one for Tucows as the registrar. The pages are largely the same, but are in fact different. Is there a way to flag these pages as not being duplicate content? Thanks, Doug.
Technical SEO | | R4L0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850