Penalised for duplicate content, time to fix?
-
Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix...
I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died.
I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere.
I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content?
The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page.
Thanks for reading
-
but remeber thats notyy a on-index tag, its a no-index,follow tag, you want the links followed, but the pages not indexed.
-
Thanks Alan. I will go for the unique categories and blocked product pages. This was the original plan but I forgot to put the no index tag on the product pages. ooops. Nothing better than experience to teach you the errors of your ways I guess hehe
Hopefully it doesn't take google too long to decide that the domain is no longer thin and it starts ranking again
-
Woooh those numbers are big, i would be worried about thin content, no-indexing will mean a lose of page rank, but its the leser of 2 evils i supose.
but i would try to
1. make the pages unique, ok its a lot of pages and you may not be able to do that.
2. i woukld makethe catagory pages unique, and put a no-index,follow tag in the product pages. This means they will not be indexed, but the links willbe followed so that link juice cna return to your other pages.
-
Alan
Thanks for the reply. The non store parts of the site were of good quality (in my opinion). They were unique articles, videos and the such. I fear that by Google seeing the store it may have classified the site, as you say, 'thin'. The products in the affiliate store out numbered the posts massively, about 11,000 products and a couple of hundred posts.
So you feel that I shouldn't no index the store pages now? Won't removing these pages from the SERPS have a positive impact on the other 'quality' pages
-
first do not no-follow links or deindex them, link juice flows around your site thought links, if they point to a non indexced page, or if the link is no-follow, the link juice is wasted, it goes up in smoke.
you dont get a penalty for duplicate content, but only one version will rank.
Having a site that is mainly thin content, is another thing. if the majority of your pages can be found elsewhere on the web or they differ only by a small amount then you may be seen as a junk site. make sure you pages are vastly different to other affilates
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
What is best practise for markup in a nav bar, avoid duplicate content.
I'm wondering what's best practise for markup in the nav bar. So if we have <nav> Can we have headers in there, does it help? If we do, would a H1 confuse google as to wether that is the H1 of importance of the one in thein the </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup0 -
How would you handle this duplicate content - noindex or canonical?
Hello Just trying look at how best to deal with this duplicated content. On our Canada holidays page we have a number of holidays listed (PAGE A)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/north-america/canada/suggested-holidays.aspx We also have a more specific Arctic Canada holidays page with different listings (PAGE B)
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/arctic-and-antarctica/arctic-canada/suggested-holidays.aspx Of the two, the Arctic Canada page (PAGE B) receives a far higher number of visitors from organic search. From a user perspective, people expect to see all holidays in Canada (PAGE A), including the Arctic based ones. We can tag these to appear on both, however it will mean that the PAGE B content will be duplicated on PAGE A. Would it be the best idea to set up a canonical link tag to stop this duplicate content causing an issue. Alternatively would it be best to no index PAGE A? Interested to see others thoughts. I've used this (Jan 2011 so quite old) article for reference in case anyone else enters this topic in search of information on a similar thing: Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical - SEO Tips0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Duplicate content question
Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate?
Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate? Currently, most of the content on our site sits behind a read gate. People have to register before they can view the detailed content. Currently, our forums are accessible to all which draws a lot of long tail traffic. Google does seem to be indexing some of our gated content, but can someone advise me how they view this content more generally please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?
I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way. The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
[eCommerce Issues] Having a tough time writing content for product color variations. Any recommendations?
wow, after being hit with panda i'm having a real tough time with this issue. Maybe i'm going about it the wrong way.. How can i possibly write unique content for all of these different colors of the same product?... http://www.suddora.com/green-sweatbands-wholesale-green-wristbands.html http://www.suddora.com/pink-sweatbands-wholesale-pink-wristbands.html http://www.suddora.com/black-sweatbands-wholesale-black-wristbands.html http://www.suddora.com/green-headbands-wholesale-pricing-available.html http://www.suddora.com/pink-headbands-wholesale-pricing-available.html http://www.suddora.com/black-headbands-wholesale-pricing-available.html Should i be going about this a different way? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0