Locating Duplicate Pages
-
Hi,
Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index.
I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success.
It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week.
I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content.
Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine.
I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem?
Thanks guys!
-
It's cool. Sorry, the point I was making is that irrespective of what you search for the page that is returned is http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php (with nothing after the .php) and as such the search results page couldn't spurn multiple pages which could be indexed by Google.
-
Hmm, I'm not too knowledgeable about php pages. Sorry!
-
Sorry, I'm not sure what happened to that bit.ly address - The actual address of the website is www.refreshcartridges.co.uk.
Ah, I see what you mean about the search results now however this hopefully shouldn't be an issue as for security (our web guy said something about injections) the URL that is returned irrespective of what is searched for is http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php
Thanks again!
-
I can't get that link to work.
What I said before still applies with physical input (this is what I assumed when I said it).
For example, user inputs the words "snakes and dogs" and clicks search. The new URL is "www.yoursite.com/search?q=snakes and dogs" All these weird URL pages need noindex meta tags or Google will flag them as duplicate content because, for example, this page and the result for "dogs and snakes" generate almost the same page.
Does that make sense?
It is in Google's Webmaster Guidelines that you should noindex these pages. -
Many thanks for your input on this. I have actually looked at this through the HTML improvements section of GWMT however I am showing only a few dozen duplicated titles / descriptions and this is simply due to the product categories being almost identical (for example HP Deskjet 500 and HP Deskjet 500+)
-
Many thanks for your response. Our site is an eCommerce site that doesn't employ tags as such and our categories are all accounted for in the 15,000 page figure.
-
We did have this at the beginning of the year when we used a ?dispmode=grid and ?dispmode=list to change the way our results were displayed. This has been rectified however by us completely removing the option and any instances of dispmode present in the URL force a 301 to the correct master page. There are still a few hundred instances of this dispmode being present in the Google index but 99% of them have fallen out now.
I have checked and double checked and we don't seem to have any issues like this at present.
-
I'm not certain if this is the case as our search engine requires physical input in order to yield a result. I don't know if it helps but the URL is http://bit.ly/4Cogchww if you fancy taking a look
-
Thanks for your reply. Indeed our website does force www. if someone were to attempt to navigate to us without prefixing www.
-
Hi Chris,
Google Webmaster has a tool that helps identify duplicate HTMLs and maybe you can use that to see if the 11,000 pages are duplicate. IF they are, I am assuming they should have the duplicate Title Tag and etc. which the tool may discover.
-
Have you checked for instances where a page parameter is being seen as another version of the same page? One of the sites I work for had an issue a few months back where every instance of a product page was being flagged as duplicate content because of an oversight. We had one of our coders write a clause into the page where every time a page loaded with a parameter such as ?color=72 it would canonicalize it to the page minus the parameter. This decreased our duplicate content warnings quickly and effectively.
-
it could be that your tags and categories are considered individual pages and therefore creating their own permalink: ex: http:www.example.com/keyword, and http://www.example.com/tag/keyword and http://www.example.com/category/keyword. Another way would be to check the sitemaps you have in webmaster tools and compare those to each other. Just a suggestion.
-
Does your website force 'www.'?
Both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are separate sites and can have different pages spidered.
-
Be sure to try different combinations of 'site:www.domain.com' and 'site:domain.com'. They will all yield different results.
Sounds to me like you probably have an internal search engine that is generating search results pages based off the search term, and each different results page is a piece of duplicate content.
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
-
How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?
I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags. I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?
On-Page Optimization | | StevenLevine0 -
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
On page SEO Strategy / What pages to use?
What is the best page to use for targeting your hard to rank keywords? The keyword phrases in question here are "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing", "Custom Aquariums", & "Acrylic Aquariums" As of right now we have created 3 separate pages for each one of these keyword phrases. http://seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums for "Custom Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums/acrylic-aquariums/ for "Acrylic Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/services/acrylic-tank-manufacturing/ for "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing" Or are we better of using the home page http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/ for the our main hard to rank for terms. Generally speaking I would think more people will link to our home page.
On-Page Optimization | | SeaQuatic0 -
Which redirect to use when redirecting to https page from http page
I have one form under https which is redirected from the regular http page. this site was not made by me and I am trying to understand if the way it was redirected using 302 redirect is a problem Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Handling Deleted Pages
The backstory: My site has a fantasy sportsbook where users can place "bets" on pretty much anything. Each game has a unique matchup page, where the odds are displayed and any conversation about the game takes place. Example here. About 95% of the games are automatically graded, but I have to manually grade the rest. Therefore, as soon as every game starts I check to see if any users have made a pick on it, and if not I delete it because it reduces my workload. The problem: About 15% of my search-driven traffic is queries for games that no longer exist, which makes sense because nobody bets on the super obscure games and these games are very easy to rank for. I am currently redirecting them to my 404 page but I'm worried that all of these hits are hurting my reputation with the big G. Would it be better to noindex all of these pages at first and take the noindex away as soon as I'm positive that the game will stay?
On-Page Optimization | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Canonical to the page itself?
Hello, I'd like to know what happens when you use canonical to the same page itself, like: Page "example.com" rel canonical="example.com" Does that impact in something? Bad or good? See ya!
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil1 -
Duplicate Title question
Thanks Mozzers in advance for any insight into what I'm sure is a basic SEO question. I'm working with a resort in the great state of Maine. Their home page title reads Maine Resorts, Resorts in Maine, (company name). The site has about 400 URL's and over half of the URL's utilize the first keyword phrase of the home page title, "Maine Resorts." Predominately, I find them used on the Accommodations pages (pages that describe each room with a picture) which I would label as deeper pages and non-conversion type pages. The page titles themselves are not exact duplicates of the Home Page Title but might read something like "Maine Resorts, Company Name, Accommodation Listing." My concern is that the heavy use of "Maine Resorts" as the first phrase in over 200 plus pages might be competing against the home page and pulling the home page ranking down. Thanks for any help given!
On-Page Optimization | | hawkvt10 -
Pages crawled
I noticed there is a limited in the number of pages crawled on galena.org? Will this number increase over time?
On-Page Optimization | | nskislak240