Duplicate Content
-
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress).
so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way.
thanks
-
Greg
Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything
"Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different."
Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag.
"Remove the tags"
By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index.
"If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages."
You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages.
Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused.
Thanks again!
-Dan
-
Justin
Sorry to hear of your trouble with making the new settings. For one, my guide on SEOmoz about setting up WordPress for SEO should be helpful. I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with that.
In these cases - the "duplicate content" is usually not the page its self but rather usually just the title tags.
This is because, imagine you have tag archives like this;
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/2/
- mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/3/
Usually the title tags respectably end up being the same;
- Pink Elephants | My Domain
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 2
- Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 3
For every single tag "subpage".
Normally, the protocol would be to;
- Noindex subpages
- Noindex tags
- Noindex dated archives
- Disable author archives (single author blog only)
- Index categories
You can still link to tag pages and use tags within the site all you want, but you just don't want to index them.
These are just default settings. Its impossible to know exactly what you should be doing without seeing your site, but I hope all of that gets you in the right direction!
-Dan
-
You should only no-follow your tags and archives and not your categories...
In the plugin settings, under permalinks, there is an option
"Strip the category base (usually
/category/
) from the category URL." this will just stop the duplicate pages from appearing,Blocking the category's must have caused the drop.
Greg
-
Changed to Yoast. I ticked no follow on archives, categories, and tags. One hour later, website went from #7 to page four.
-
Well, the duplicate content is causing issues alone.. Google does not like duplicate pages at all...
If you select which are your primary pages, and tell google to ignore the rest, it can only help your ranking.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, all you need to do is set tags to no-follow and no-index, and also strip the category from the URL. (it redirects automatically, as well)
Greg
-
Thanks for the reply. Would this affect ranking or can it be left alone ?
-
Wordpress does this when you use tags....
Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different.
2 Options that i can think of.
1.) Remove the tags and strip the category segment in the URL and stop using them in future. This will require redirects from duplicate URL"s to the main article (this will take planning, allot of time and is quite complicated)
2.) If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages. This tells Google were the original page can be found. Tags are only their for user experience so you can set these to no-follow and no-index.
Greg
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
-
Fullsite=true coming up as duplicate content?
Hello, I am new to the fullsite=true method of mobile site to desktop site, and have recently found that about 50 of the instances in which I added fullsite=true to links from our blog show as a duplicate to the page that it is pointing to? Could someone tell me why this would be? Do I need to add some sort of rel=canonical to the main page (non-fullsite=true) or how should I approach this? Thanks in advance for your help! L
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Duplicate content or titles
Hello , I am working on a site, I am facing the duplicate title and content errors,
Technical SEO | | KLLC
there are following kind of errors : 1- A link with www and without www having same content. actually its a apartment management site, so it has different bedrooms apartments and booking pages , 2- my second issue is related to booking and details pages of bedrooms, because I am using 1 file for all booking and 1 file for all details page. these are the main errors which i am facing ,
can anyone give me suggestions regarding these issues ? Thnaks,0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
An odd duplicate content issue...
Hi all, my developers have just assured me that nothing has changed form last week but in the today's crawl I see all the website duplicated: and the difference on the url is the '/' so basically the duplicated urls are: htts://blabla.bla/crop htts://blabla.bla/crop/ Any help in understanding why is much appreciated. thanks
Technical SEO | | LeadGenerator0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Thin/Duplicate Content
Hi Guys, So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this. Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DPASeo0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0 -
URL Duplicate Content Issues (Website Transition)
Hey guys, I just transitioned my website and I have a question. I have built up all the link juice around my old url styles. To give you some clarity: My old CMS rendered links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands My new CMS renders links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands/ My new CMS's auto-sitemap also generates them with the slash on the end. Also throughout the website the CMS links to them with the slash at the end and i link to them without the slash (because it's what i am used to). I have the canonical without the slash. Should I just 301 to the version with the slash before google crawls again? I'm worried that i'll lose all the trust and ranking i built up to the one without the slash. I rank very high for certain keywords and some pages house a large portion of our traffic. What a mess! Help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0