SEOMoz Internal Dupe. Content & Possible Coding Issues

[WPColt]

SEOmoz Community!

I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped...

First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point.

Now, the issues I am having:

1. I have two sites: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx

A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments).

I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages:

• Car Financing How It Works

• A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit

(Please let me know if you could use more examples)

At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords.

All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not!

I could really use some significant help here...

2. Both of our sites have a number of access points:

http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such.

However, my sites can also be reached via the following:

http://www.federalautoloan.com

http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com

http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx

Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags?

I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details.

Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it!

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[WPColt]

Hey Cyrus,

Thank you very much for the detailed response!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Colt,

Looks to me like you're getting a duplicate content errors because your page templates are so large, they are tripping the SEOmoz duplicate content filter, which goes off if more than 95% of your code is similar between 2 pages.

For example, take a look at these 2 URLs.

http://www.federalautoloan.com/Why-Shopping-for-an-Auto-Loan-is-Good.aspx

http://www.federalautoloan.com/Regarding-Dealer-Financing.aspx

With the gazillions of links at the bottom of the two pages, the pages have 98% similar code. (You can check it out yourself with this duplicate content tool) The good news is the TEXT content similarity is less than 40%.

1. Google is more sophisticated than Moz, but it would be a good idea to remove some of those links and put them into categories. If you could get these 100 or so links down to 20, that would be closer to ideal

2. Just a recommendation > most of your text is in a scroll box. I'd reformat your page so that all the text was visible without the box. Not sure if this is hurting you or not, but it seems contrary to best user experience, so I'd be inclined to think Google doesn't look to favorably on it.

3. Noticed you blocked a lot of files in your robots.txt, including your css. Unless you have a very specific reason for keeping Google out of these files, I'd let them crawl as Google uses CSS to render your page to see what content is above and below the fold.

4. Best practices is to redirect non-www to www versions of your site (or vice versa). If you can't do this, a canonical tag will do just as well. But how about redirecting everything WITHOUT the /index.aspx? That would look cleaner in search results.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[loopyal]

Hello Colt.

You have the joys of a Microsoft webserver.

That means all of these URLs work - and many more:

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspx

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CRedit.aspx

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREdit.aspx

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-CREDit.aspx

It does exactly the same thing if you remove the www.

• duplicate content issues.

Also, if you do this:

http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/A-Home-Loan-Is-Possible-with-Bad-Credit.aspxZ

• you return a 200 response code and serve up the front page

I didn't find a way to make your server give me a 404

[WPColt]

As an aside: please feel free to extend any other SEO suggestions you may have my way! I am doing my best to learn the SEO trade... and ANY advice is appreciated.