Wordpress Duplicate Content
-
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use.
I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
-
But of course! You're welcome and thanks for the assistance!
-Marty
-
Great Marty! Thanks for letting us know, and glad you got it sorted out.
-Dan
-
Thank you both for your responses! I was actually able to figure out the issue on my own, but I appreciate all the helpful advice. All of our redirects from the past blog domain work perfectly and were added by hand, and we are unable to use .htaccess with our servers (quite annoying believe me). But I greatly appreciate that advice Ben; I'm sure it will help someone with this issue.
The issue that was causing all the errors was our relative path structure on the root domain. When moving the blog to the subdomain we accidentally left 4 links in the footer as relative paths instead of absolute. Therefore the bot were attempting to access the root from the subdomain through those relative paths, which in-turn created multiple 404 pages for every blog page.
I appreciate the help guys. Screaming Frog, SEO Moz, and GWT definitely all helped on this one.
Thanks!
-
Marty
Did you both move to the subdomain and switch to Yoast at the same time. Or is the WordPress setup essentially the same, and all you did is switch to the subdomain?
If you were already using Yoast before the switch, have you changed settings, or did those stay the same too?
Are the crawl errors happening in the Moz tools? Google Webmaster Tools? Can you confirm by manually trying to visit the URLs?
Lastly, when you say "pages that do not exist to begin with" - do they still not exit? Are they at all similar to pages that do exist?
Sorry for all the questions, just trying to nail it down for you and also see if Ben has answered it.
-Dan
-
If you moved the site into a subdomain then all the links that used to point to the old blog (that wasn't on a subdomain) won't work.
You need to add a .htaccess file to the root of your website and put in redirects for broken links. Something like the following should work:
<code>Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301] RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.example.com/$1</code>
This will basically redirect the old links for your blog to the subdomain, which will help Google know that the pages have moved. The whole point of 301 redirects (if you don't already know) is to ensure your pages retain their page rank if you change your site structure. Now its been said that you lose some page rank using a 301 redirect from the old location to the new location, but that's better than Google assuming the page has been removed from your site as this would mean Google will remove the site from its index and you can wave goodbye to that page's good search position.
I hope this helps, if you need me to clarify anything let me know.
Ben
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 can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Problem with Duplicate Page Wordpress
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web agency. I'am working on a new client website and i have found this kind of errors through MOZ (Image 1). I checked all the URLs; they work and they remind to the Homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
The website is made with Wordpress. I have already tried to solve this problem with 301 redirect but, as i supposed, it didn't work.
I think that is a problem related to Wordpress URL in Wordpress settings (Image 2). However i would like to know if anybody had the same problem or if there are other possibile causes. Thank you in advance! zDVL0pj aB7MeGe0 -
Duplicate content on .com .au and .de/europe/en. Would it be wise to move to .com?
This is the scenario: A webstore has evolved into 7 sites in 3 shops: example.com/northamerica example.de/europe example.de/europe/en example.de/europe/fr example.de/europe/es example.de/europe /it example.com.au .com/northamerica .de/europe/en and .com.au all have mostly the same content on them (all 3 are in english). What would be the best way to avoid duplicate content? An answer would be very much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Duplicate Page Content Errors on Moz Crawl Report
Hi All, I seem to be losing a 'firefighting' battle with regards to various errors being reported on the Moz crawl report relating to; Duplicate Page Content Missing Page Title Missing Meta Duplicate Page Title While I acknowledge that some of the errors are valid (and we are working through them), I find some of them difficult to understand... Here is an example of a 'duplicate page content' error being reported; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com (which is obviously our homepage) Is reported to have 'duplicate page content' compared with the following pages; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/guides/gratuities http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/holland-america-2014-offers/?order_by=brochure_lead_difference http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/about-us/meet-the-team/craig All 3 of those pages are completely different hence my confusion... This is just a solitary example, there are many more! I would be most interested to hear what people's opinions are... Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690