Masses (5,168 issues found) of Duplicate content.
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a site that has returned 5,168 issues with duplicate content.
Where would you start?
I started sorting via High page Authority first the highest being 28 all the way down to 1. I did want to use the rel=canonical tag as the site has many redirects already.
The duplicates are caused by various category and cross category pages and search results such as ....page/1?show=2&sort=rand.
I was thinking of going down the lines of a URL rewrite and changing the search anyway. Is it work redirecting everything in terms of results versus the effort of changing all the 5,168 issues?
Thanks
sm
-
Hi Guys,
Thanks for the responses I'm going to have a look at the issue again, with your suggestions in mind. And I'll keep you posted. Thanks again.
-
Don't look at individual URLs - at the scale of 5K plus, look at your site architecture and what kind of variants you're creating. For example, if you know that the show= and sort= parameter are a possible issue, you could go to Google and enter something like:
site:example.com inurl:show=
(warning: it will return pages with the word "show" in the URL, like "example.com/show-times" - not usually an issue, but it can be on rare occasion).
That'll give you a sense of how many cases that one parameter is creating. Odds are, you'll find a couple that are causing 500+ of the 5K duplicates, so start with those.
Search pagination is very tricky - you could canonicalize to "View All" as Chris Hill said, you could NOINDEX pages 2+, or you could try Google's new (but very complicated way):
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Problem is, that doesn't work on Bing and it's pretty easy to mess up.
The rel-canonical tag can scoop up sorts pretty well. You can also tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools what those parameters do, and whether to index them, but I've had mixed luck with that. If you're not having any serious problems, GWT is easy and worth a shot.
-
Have a look at your pagination too. If you've not got a 'show all' link it might be worth putting one in and making that the canonical. Should eliminate some of your duplicate content issues.
-
Last I came accross such an issue I mostly started with making the 'easy' changes that reduced the number the most.
In the last case, it was implimenting a 301 to the www version of the site (cutting the errors in half) and putting a canonical on one search page.
This got the number down to the point where it was easyer to make decisions on 'Is it worth making friendlyer urls' and discover more intresting places dup content was being generated.
It's one of these things I would always aim for 0 where I can. It usualy means that the url or site structure can be improved sugnificantly, or it's such an easy fix that it's hard to justify not doing.
-
If it really is a URL issue then you should just be able to easily canonical the root pages and the rest should sort itself out. Start there and let the next spidering tell you where you stand.
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
-
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Duplicate content in Magento
Hi all We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing. For example: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page. Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess? Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Is this considered Duplicate Content?
Good Morning, Just wondering if these pages are considered duplicate content? http://goo.gl/t9lkm http://goo.gl/mtfbf Can you please take a look and advise if it is considered duplicate and if so, what should i do to fix... Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
How to Solve Duplicate Page Content Issue?
I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website. I have found 89 duplicate content issue from report. Please, look in to Duplicate Page Content Issue. I am quite confuse to resolve this issue. Can any one suggest me best solution to resolve it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0