To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
-
Hello,
If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise.
We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content.
I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
-
Sanket,
Great links, thank you for posting them.
Update The weekly web crawler diagnostics report showed a decrease in total errors found. Looks like the 301 redirect worked. Thanks guys!
-
You have multilingual site with same content? If your multilingual website indicate duplication error then rel= canonical and 301 both you can apply for solving problem. You can also make the URL/ sub-folder structure. Rel canonical also best option for this. If you want to permanently move that version to your min domain then you can use 31 redirect. Read these both links for the getting more idea about solving duplication error.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
-
Zach,
You are absolutely right about the CMS plugins, they really do have a mind of their own. Especially the plugins for Joomla.
Thank you for your reply, I am much relieved now....whew. The website is due for another web crawl, hopefully the errors will decrease... good grief.
-
Hello,
In this case a 301 Redirect would be the smart move. This is where some issues come in with plugins with many of the mainstream CMSs, some things tend to have a mind of their own and make new URLs and the like.
You definitely want to remove the English content from the multilingual pages or disallow search crawlers for the pages that would be considered duplicate content, as you don't want your English pages suffering for Spanish content (or lack there of).
Hope this helps
Zach
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
-
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Migration to New Domain - 301 Redirect Questions
My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name. However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name. So, my question(s) is/are: Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything? Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs? General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kenny-King0 -
Redirecting old domain to new domain with wordpress
Hi all, I need to change domain name to a website published on wordpress. I'd think to make these steps: trasferring the website (files+db) to a new hosting space to redirect old site (www.oldsite.com) to the new one (www.newsite.com) using rewrite rules. With these steps I'd need to transfer and reinstall files and wordpress so I would like to discover if there's some less time expending procedure to consider. Thanks and ciao Bob
Technical SEO | | bobrock40 -
How do I Address Low Quality/Duplicate Content Issue for a Job portal?
Hi, I want to optimize my job portal for maximum search traffic. Problems Duplicate content- The portal takes jobs from other portals/blogs and posts on our site. Sometimes employers provide the same job posting to multiple portals and we are not allowed to change it resulting in duplicate content Empty Content Pages- We have a lot of pages which can be reached via filtering for multiple options. Like IT jobs in New York. If there are no IT jobs posted in New York, then it's a blank page with little or no content Repeated Content- When we have job postings, we have about the company information on each job listing page. If a company has 1000 jobs listed with us, that means 1000 pages have the exact same about the company wording Solutions Implemented Rel=prev and next. We have implemented this for pagination. We also have self referencing canonical tags on each page. Even if they are filtered with additional parameters, our system strips of the parameters and shows the correct URL all the time for both rel=prev and next as well as self canonical tags For duplicate content- Due to the volume of the job listings that come each day, it's impossible to create unique content for each. We try to make the initial paragraph (at least 130 characters) unique. However, we use a template system for each jobs. So a similar pattern can be detected after even 10 or 15 jobs. Sometimes we also take the wordy job descriptions and convert them into bullet points. If bullet points already available, we take only a few bullet points and try to re-shuffle them at times Can anyone provide me additional pointers to improve my site in terms of on-page SEO/technical SEO? Any help would be much appreciated. We are also thinking of no-indexing or deleting old jobs once they cross X number of days. Do you think this would be a smart strategy? Should I No-index empty listing pages as well? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | jombay3 -
Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name. The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible. Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | sitestrux0 -
Duplicate content issue. Delete index.html and replace with www.?
I have a duplicate content issue. On my site the home button goes to the index.html and not the www. If I change it to the www will it impact my SERPS? I don't think anyone links to the index.html.
Technical SEO | | bronxpad1 -
Should I 301 my non-www accesses to www accesses?
We have external links pointing to both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. I read this: http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/ and wondered if I should add this to my .htaccess file: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
Technical SEO | | scanlin
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] so that the link juice all flows to the www version of the site? Any reason not to do it?0