Error msg 'Duplicate Page Content', how to fix?

[pjuszczynski]

Hey guys,

I'm new to SEO and have the following error msg 'Duplicate Page Content'. Of course I know what it means, but my question is how do you delete the old pages that has duplicate content?

I use to run my website through Joomla! but have since moved to Shopify. I see that the duplicated site content is still from the old Joomla! site and I would like to learn how to delete this content (or best practice in this situation).

Any advice would be very helpful!

Cheers,

Peter

[Resultify]

I dont think the problem is the https vs http here.

Maybe you could share one of the erros with me?

Fredrik

[pjuszczynski]

Hi Fredrik,

Thanks for the follow up! I got the error msg from my SEOmoz dashboard. I just got it a couple days ago and the first crawl has been completed. I can also see in Google Webmaster a similar error msg. The old pages are on an older SSL secured site, but the domain is still the same.

For example, my old site was https://www.kellanapparel.com and now I don't use the SSL certificate and the website is hosted on a new platform (shopify) but with the same domain minus 's' (so now its http://www.kellanapparel.com). Maybe it's the case that the old SSL certificate is still valid and because the old content is associated on there it's still triggering? Would this make a difference?

Cheers,

Peter

[Resultify]

Hi Peter

When you say you got the message  'Duplicate Page Content', is this from Google Webmaster Tools?

You mention an old page? Is that still active under different domain?

To avoid the duplicate content error you need to make sure that there is only ONE url for each piece of content. There are many ways of achieving this and here I only suggest a few:

Canonical tags

Try to use Canonical tags where ever you can. This can be implemented on both versions. The orgininal version should have tags pointing to itself. More info on excatly how to do this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Remove old site from index

Make sure the old system is no longer indexed. Do this using either robots.txt or add a no index no follow metatag.

More on robots.txt here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotst.xt

301 redirects

Try to use 301 redirects pointing any old page to the new page. You can also use this to point non www pages to always use www or the other way around. If you have old pages on a different system make sure these are not online. If they are still active on different domain, make sure to make 301 redirects to the new page.

More on this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

You can find more info on how to avoid this error on this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Good luck and hope these tips can help you get started.

Fredrik