How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
-
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines.
To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs.
I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index.
The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one.
I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value.
I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages.
My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
-
My first question back at you is why is your hosting company deciding your canonical structure for you?
a hosting company should just host and you should be using canonical tags and .htaccess to sort out your own canonical URLs. So my gut reaction is to change hosting company.After that:
- Open Site Explorer - put both URLs in and see which ones are being linked to and which has the highest value.
If you're not a PRO member then take the 30 day trial and use OSE to sort this issue out. You'll be glad you did.
After that... seriously as a web designer & SEO, not having control of my own URLs would annoy the heck out of me, so change hosting provider. That'll be the second biggest favour you could give yourself
Slightly opinionated, I know, but at the end of the day it's your website not your host's.
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 homepage - Google canonical 'N/A'?
Hi, I redesigned a clients website and launched it two weeks ago. Since then, I have 301 redirected all old URL's in Google's search results to their counterparts on the new site. However, none of the new pages are appearing in the search results and even the homepage has disappeared. Only old site links are appearing (even though the old website has been taken down ) and in GSC, it's stating that: Page is not indexed: Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user However, when I try to understand how to fix the issue and see which URL it is claiming to be a duplicate of, it says: Google-selected canonical: N/A It says that the last crawl was only yesterday - how can I possibly fix it without knowing which page it says it's a duplicate of? Is this something that just takes time, or is it permanent? I would understand if it was just Google taking time to crawl the pages and index but it seems to be adamant it's not going to show any of them at all. 55.png
Technical SEO | | goliath910 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Determining where duplicate content comes from...
I am getting duplicate content warnings on the SEOMOZ crawl. I don't know where the content is duplicated. Is there a site that will find duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
URL Rewrite
We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site? What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Getting rid of duplicate content with rel=canonical
This may sound like a stupid question, however it's important that I get this 100% straight. A new client has nearly 6k duplicate page titles / descriptions. To cut a long story short, this is mostly the same page (or rather a set of pages), however every time Google visits these pages they get a different URL. Hence the astronomical number of duplicate page titles and descriptions. Now the easiest way to fix this looks like canonical linking. However, I want to be absolutely 100% sure that Google will then recognise that there is no duplicate content on the site. Ideally I'd like to 301 but the developers say this isn't possible, so I'm really hoping the canonical will do the job. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0
