Duplicate content issues caused by our CMS
-
Hello fellow mozzers,
Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients.
We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS.
Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk).
We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed.
We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't.
Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions?
Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?
-
Hi Nick,
Given that you have tried all of the above, I recommend cutting off the search engines at the source, in your Robots.txt.
Once you manually exclude the page in your robots.txt doc, the search engines will no longer crawl and index the page. After enough time passes, the page should disappear from the SE's cache.
Here is a moz tutorial for how to exclude the page: Robot's Exclusion Protocol
Just a heads up..you may want to give it a week or so for the SEs to catch up on all the work you have already done to resolve the issue. Then try the above solution.
Good luck!
-
You have redirected the index.php version to the / version and it doesn't work? Sounds like you made an error in your .htaccess file then. Make sure your redirects are correct and that every index.php redirects to the / version of the URL and then use the canonical tag to specify the / version as the one you want. Wait a couple weeks and it should get fixed just fine. If it isn't, you probably didn't set up the 301 redirects properly.
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
-
Unsolved Duplicate Content
We have multiple collections being flagged as duplicate content - but I can't find where these duplications are coming from? The duplicate content has no introductory text, and no meta description. Please see examples:- This is the correct collection page:-
Technical SEO | | Caroline_Ardmoor
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/deerhunter This is the incorrect collection page:-
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/vendors How do I stop this incorrect page from showing?0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hello, After crawling our site Moz is detecting high priority duplicate page content for our product and article listing pages, For example http://store.bmiresearch.com/bangladesh/power and http://store.bmiresearch.com/newzealand/power are being listed as duplicate pages although they have seperate URLs, page titles and H1 tags. They have the same product listed but I would have thought the differentiation in other areas would be sufficient for these to not be deemed as duplicate pages. Is it likely this issue will be impacting on our search rankings? If so are there any recommendations as to how this issue can be overcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Is anyone using Canonicalization for duplicate content
Hi i am trying to find out if anyone is using Canonicalization for duplicate content on a joomla site. I am using joomla 1.5 and trying to find either a module or manually how to sort this out as i have over 300 pages of duplicate content because i am not using this technique any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
How to handle this specific duplicate title issue
Part of my website is a directory of companies. Some of the companies have mane locations in the same city. For these listings titles and url's are like this: 1. Company ABC - Miami, FL http://www.website.com/florida/miami/company-abc-10001 2. Company ABC - Miami, FL http://www.website.com/florida/miami/company-abc-10002 What is the best way to fix this problem? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Boxes0 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0