How critical is Duplicate content warnings?
-
Hi,
So I have created my first campaign here and I have to say the tools, user interface and the on-page optimization, everything is useful and I am happy with SEOMOZ.
However, the crawl report returned thousands of errors and most of them are duplicate content warnings.
As we use Drupal as our CMS, the duplicate content is caused by Drupal's pagination problems. Let's say there is a page called "/top5list" , the crawler decided /top5list?page=1" to be duplicate of "/top5list". There is no real solution for pagination problems in Drupal (as far as I know).
I don't have any warnings in Google's webmaster tools regarding this and my sitemap I submitted to Google doesn't include those problematic deep pages. (that are detected as duplicate content by SEOMOZ crawler)
So my question is, should I be worried about the thousands of error messages in crawler diagnostics?
any ideas appreciated
-
Personally, I'd keep an eye on it. These things do have a way of expanding over time, so you may want to be proactive. At the moment, though, you probably don't have to lose sleep over it.
-
Thanks for that command Dr. Meyers. Apparently, only 5 such pages are indexed. I suppose I shouldn't worry about this then?
-
One clarification one Vahe's answer - if these continue (?page=2, ?page=3, etc.) then it's traditional pagination. You could use the GWT solution Adam mentioned, although, honestly, I find it's hit-or-miss. It is simpler than other solution. The "ideal" Google solution is very hard to implement (and I actually have issues with it). The other option is to META NOINDEX the variants, but that would take adjusting the template code dynamically.
If it's just an issue of a bunch of "page=1" duplicates, and this isn't "true" pagination, then canonical tags are probably your best bet. There may be a Drupal plug-in or fix - unfortunately, I don't have much Drupal experience.
The question is whether these pages are being indexed by Google, and how many of them there are. At large scale, these kinds of near-duplicates can dilute your index, harm rankings, and even contribute to Panda issues. At smaller scale, though, they might have no impact at all. So, it's not always clear cut, and you have to work the risk/cost calculation.
You can run a command in Google like:
site:example.com inurl:page=
...and try to get a sense of how much of this content is being indexed.
The GWT approach won't hurt, and it's fine to try. I just find that Google doesn't honor it consistently.
-
Thanks Adam and Vahe. Your suggestions are definitely helpful.
-
For pagination problem's it would be better to use this cannonical method- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html .
Having dup content in the form paginated results will not penalise you, rather the page/link equity will be split between all these pages. This means you would need to spend more time and energy on the original page to outrank your competitors.
To see these errors in Google Webmaster Tools you should go to the HTML sections area where it will review the sites meta data. I'm sure ull find the same issues there, instead of the sitemaps.
So to improve the overall health of your website, I would suggest that you do try and verify this issue.
Hope this helps. Any issues, best to contact me directly.
Regards,
Vahe
-
OK, this is just what I've done, and it might not work for everyone.
As far as I can tell, the duplicate content warnings do not hurt my rankings, I don't think. When I first signed up for SEOMoz they really alarmed me. If they are hurting my rankings, it's not much - as we preform well in many competitive keywords for our industry, and our website traffic has been growing ~20% year over year for many years now.
The fix for auto-generated duplicate content on our site (which I inherited as my responsibility when I started at my company) would be very expensive. It's something I plan on doing eventually along with some other overhauls, but right now it's not in the budget, because it would basically involve re-architecting how the site and databases function on the back end (ugh).
So, in order to help mitigate any issues and help keep Google from indexing all the duplicate content that can be generated by our system, I use the "URL Parameters" setting in Google Webmaster Tools (under Site Configuration). I've set up a few parameters for Google to specifically NOT INDEX, to keep the duplicate content out of the search engine. I've also set some parameters to specifically reenforce content I want indexed (along with including the original content in sitemaps I've curated myself, rather than having auto-generated sitemaps potentially polluted with duplicate content).
My thinking is that while Roger the SEOMoz bot is still finding this stuff and generating warnings, Googlebot is not.
I don't work at an agency - I'm in-house and I've hard to learn everything by trial and error and often fly by the seat of my pants with this sort of thing. So my conclusion/solutions may be wrong or not work for you, but it seems to work for me.
It's a band-aid fix at best, but it seems to be better than nothing!
Hope this helps,
-Adam
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
-
How do I avoid this issue of duplicate content with Google?
I have an ecommerce website which sells a product that has many different variations based on a vehicle’s make, model, and year. Currently, we sell this product on one page “www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001” and we show a modal to sort through each make, model, and year. This is important because based on the make, model, and year, we have different prices/configurations for each. For example, for the Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Cherokee, we might have different products: Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2011-2013 - $350 Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2014 - 2015 - $350 Utlimate Pet Liner - Jeep Cherokee 2011-2015 - $400 Although the typical consumer might think we have 1 product (the Ultimate Pet Liner), we look at these as many different types of products, each with a different configuration and different variants. We do NOT have unique content for each make, model, and year. We have the same content and images for each. When the customer selects their make, model, and year, we just search and replace the text to make it look like the make, model, and year. For example, when a custom selects 2015 Jeep Wrangler from the modal, we do a search and replace so the page will have the same url (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001) but the product title will say “2015 Jeep Wrangler”. Here’s my problem: We want all of these individual products to have their own unique urls (cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) so we can reference them in emails to customers and ideally we start creating unique content for them. Our only problem is that there will be hundreds of them and they don’t have unique content other than us switching in the product title and change of variants. Also, we don’t want our url www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 to lose its link juice. Here’s my question(s): My assumption is that I should just keep my url: www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 and be able to sort through the products on that page. Then I should go ahead and make individual urls for each of these products (i.e. cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) but just add a “nofollow noindex” to the page. Is this what I should do? How secure is a “no-follow noindex” on a webpage? Does Google still index? Am I at risk for duplicate content penalties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kirbyfike0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
How do I deal with my pages being seen as duplicate content by SeoMoz?
My Dashboard is giving my lots of warnings for duplicate content but it all seems to have something to do with the www and the slash / For example: http://www.ebow.ie/ is seen as having the same duplicate content as http:/ebow.ie/ and http://www.ebow.ie Alos lots to do with how Wordpress categorizes pages and tags that is driving me bonkers! Any help appreciated! Dave. seomoz.png
Technical SEO | | ebowdublin0 -
What are some of the negative effects of having duplicate content from other sites?
This could include republishing several articles from another site with permission.
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php
Technical SEO | | RouteAccounts0 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0