Duplicate content warnings
-
I have a ton of duplicate content warnings for my site poker-coaching.net, but I can't see where there are duplicate URLs. I cannot find any function where I could check the original URL vs a list of other URLs where the duplicate content is?
-
thanks for the help. I am trying to cover all bases here. Duplicate content was one concern, the other one is too high link density and bad incoming links.
I have downloaded a full backlinks report now using Majestic SEO (OSE only shows incoming links from 74 domains...).
I think I may have found the problem. I used to have a forum on that domain years ago which was hacked and used for a lot of spammy outgoing links for stuff like Cialis, Viagra etc.. Those guys also linked from other sites to my forum pages. Example:| from: http://www.grupoibira.com/foro/viewto... | Anchor: buy flagyl in lincolnu... | 3 | to: http://www.poker-coaching.net/phpbb3/... |
When I closed the forum and deleted the forum plugin, I redirected all forum pages to my main page which, under the circumstances was a bad mistake I guess. Because with the redirect, all those spammy links now end up pointing to my main page, right? So first, I have removed that redirect now.
But the problem remains that I still have plenty of links from spam sites pointing to URLs of my domain that do not exist any more.
Is there anything else I can do to remove those links or have Google remove/disregard them, or do you think a reconsideration request explaining the situation would help? -
Honestly, with only 235 indexed pages, it's pretty doubtful that duplicate content caused you an outright penalty (such as being hit with Panda). Given your industry, it's much more likely you've got a link-based penalty or link quality issue in play.
You do have a chunk of spammy blog comments and some low-value article marketing, for example:
http://undertheinfluence.nationaljournal.com/2010/02/summit-attendees.php
A bit of that is fine (and happens in your industry a lot), but when it's too much of your link profile too soon, you could be getting yourself into penalty territory.
-
Hey There,
Just to clarify, to see the source of those errors, you’ll need to download your Full Crawl Diagnostics CSV and open it up in something like Excel. In the first column, perform a search for the URL of the page you are looking for. When you find the correct row, look in the last column labeled referrer. This tells you the referral URL of the page where our crawlers first found the target URL. You can then visit this URL to find the source of your errors. If you need more help with that, check out this link: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20895376-crawl-diagnostics-csv
Hope that helps! I will look at the issue on the back end to see if they are actually duplicate content.
Have a great day,
Nick
-
Thanks for looking into this. Actually I checked the whole site by doing a batch search on Copyscape and there were only minor duplicate content issues. I resolved those by editing the content parts in question (on February 24th 2012).
Since I am desperately searching for the reasons why this site was penalized (and it def is...), it would be great to know why your duplicate content checker finds errors. Could only be related to multiple versions of one page on different URLs. I do have all http://mysitedotcom redirected to www.mysitedotcom, and the trailing slash/notrailingslash URL problem was also resolved by a redirect long ago, so I do not know where the problem lies.
Thanks for the help! -
I think our system has roughly a 90-95% threshold for duplicate content. The pages I'm seeing in your campaign don't look that high, so something is up - I'm checking with support.
For now, use the "Duplicate Page Title" section - that'll tend to give you exact duplicates. The duplicate content detection also covers thin content and near duplicates.
-
Yes that is what I first thought too. If only it were that easy.
But when I do, I see a couple of URLs that definitely do not have any duplicate content . Could it be that the dupe content check considers text in sitewide modules (like the modules "Poker News" and "Tips for ...." in www.poker-coaching.net) as duplicate content, because they appear on all pages?
This way, the duplicate content finding function is totally worthless. -
If you drill down into your campaign report into 'Crawl Diagnostics' you will see a dropdown menu that's named "Show". Select 'Duplicate Page Content'... you will see a graph with a table below it. To the right of the URL you will see a column named "Other URL's". The numbers in that column are live links to a page with the list of URL's with duplicate content. At least that is how it is displayed in my campaigns.
-
You will find this information at google webmaster tools and at seomoz campaing. There you will the information you need.
One easy way to avoid this is to include the rel canonical metag. You need to include in every page (pages you want to be the official one) inside the head tag the follow:
where ww.example.com/index.html is your page adress. Good luck!
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
-
Ecommerce, Product Content & Google Metrics
Hi I know Google has many different variations of what they consider to be thin content. I wondered if anyone has an idea of the best metric to determine what content you need to improve on your site? I work on a large e-commerce site so there are a thousands of product pages - all with product descriptions similar [but not duplicate] to competitors. I guess in terms of quantity, these pages don't have huge amounts of written content, so I'm wondering what Google classes as 'thin' on a product page: 1. Does Google just expect a conversion to deem that product page useful? And if not, what's the best metric to identify what works vs. what doesn't on product pages in Google's eyes. 2. If adding lots of product pages on mass is bad and will decrease overall authority? The content isn't duplicate, but may be fairly similar to other sites selling the same thing. I'm trying to get our reviews added directly to product pages rather than in a pop up to improve the unique content and I'm starting to write guides, FAQ's and I'll work towards getting video started - however, I'm the only SEO & we don't have much resource so this all takes time. If anyone else has any advice on steps to take that would be great 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate page content
I'm seeing duplicate page content for tagged URLs. For example:
Reporting & Analytics | | DolbySEO
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html?onlnk=al-sc as well as PPC campaigns. We tag certain landing pages purposefully in order to understand that traffic comes from these pages, since we use Google Analytics and don't have the abiility to see clickpaths in the package we have. Is there a way to set parameters for crawling to exclude certain pages or tagged content, such as those set up for PPC campaigns?0 -
Duplicate content and ways to deal with it.
Problem I queried back a year for the portal and we can see below that the SEO juice is split between the upper and lowercase. You can see the issue in the attached images. http://i.imgur.com/OXnPp.png Solutions: 1) Quick: Change the link on the pages above to be lowercase 2) Use canonical link tag http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps The tag is part of the HTML header on a web page, the same section you'd find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag. In fact, this tag isn't new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/MBA" /> ''This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL http://www.darden.virginia.edu/MBA and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.'' 3) See if there is any Google Analytics filters at the site level I can apply. I will check into this and get back to you. What do you all think?????? OXnPp voJdp.png OXnPp.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Duplicate Page Title
I'm new to SEO and have just signed up to SEOMOZ to see what I can learn. I got the report back on my site and it indicates various errors, one of them being Duplicate Page Title - I have a blog on my site and a lot of pages identified as with duplicates are like this: http://www.martinspencephotography.co.uk/blog?page=2 Is it important I rectify this? Do I need to rectify it?
Reporting & Analytics | | MartinSpence460 -
When I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
when I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
Reporting & Analytics | | Doug_Hay1 -
How serious are the Duplicate page content and Tags error?
I have a travel booking website which reserves flights, cars, hotels, vacation packages and Cruises. I encounter a huge number of Duplicate Page Title and Content error. This is expected because of the nature of my website. Say if you look for flights between Washington DC and London Heathrow you will at least get 60 different options with same content and title tags. How can I go about reducing the harm if any of duplicate content and meta tags on my website? Knowing that invariably I will have multiple pages with same content and tags? Would appreciate your advice? S.H
Reporting & Analytics | | sherohass0 -
Duplicate page content
I have a website which "houses" five different and completely separate departments, so the content is separated by subfolders. e.g. domain.com/department1 domain.com/department2 etc. and each have their own individual top navigation menus. There is an "About Us" section for each department which has about 6 subpages (Work for us, What we do, Awards etc.) but the problem is that the content for each department is exactly the same. The only difference is the navigation menu and the breadcrumbs. This isn't ideal as a change to one page means having to make the change to all 5 and from an SEO perspective it's duplicate content x5 (apart from the Nav). One solution I can see is to have the "About Us" section moved to the root level (domain.com/about-us) and have a generic nav, possibly with the department names on it. The only problem with this is that it disrupts the user journey if they are forced away from the department that they're chosen. Basically i'm looking for suggestions or examples of other sites that have got around this problem, I need inspiration! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | haydennz0 -
Sub-category considered duplicate content?
Hello, My craw diagnostics from the PRO account is telling me that the following two links have duplicate content and duplicate title tag: http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases (New Blu-ray Releases) http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases/action-adventure (New Action & Adventure Releases | Blu-ray) I am really new to the SEO world so I am stuck trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. My question is how should I fix this issue. I guess I can put canonical tag on all sub-categories but I was worried that search engines would not craw the sub-categories and index potentially valuable pages. Thanks for all the help.
Reporting & Analytics | | hirono0