Duplicate content vs. less content
-
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to.
In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content.
Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content.
Thanks for your help. Erik
-
|
This is from seomoz crawl report. mostly all of it is forum and user profiles.
Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57 Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57-0
|
WA Jer | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wa-jer wavekitegirl | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wavekitegirl White Abbot | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/white-abbot |
|
-
The -0 is Drupal's way of handling duplicate page titles, duplicate file names etc. You may indeed have an issue where two "nodes" are being generated. If this is the case you are basically creating a competitor for yourself.
Do you want to share the site and two URL's that are duplicated?
-
Thank your for the responses. We have a popular ride board that is awesome, and some buy and sell... other than that most of our forum has moved to our Facebook page. About 1/3 of the duplicate content has a -0 after the title. I am not sure how to take it out from the robots.txt file.
i guess the heart of my questions is I have always thought that all the content from the forum would help us in SEO. Is it possible that it is really hurting us? How does google look at a site that has a ton of pages ( we are an old site that keeps all of our content so folks can search it, old surf reports...) but a ton of errors and duplicate content. How much will solving errors and duplicate content help vs. just working on more links? Where do i focus energy?
-
Don't take down a forum if it has an active community, instead focus on the canonical control of the forum. Depending on your Drupal set-up this could be tricky to implement. That being the case then you could always block Googlebot's access to the duplicated pages then remove the URLs from the index through GWT. The last option would be to review your Drupal template and insert a PHP conditional statement to issue a noindex,follow command in the robots meta tag, for certain pages. Look at the URLs and see if there's a pattern as to which pages are the 'duplicates' and try to match that pattern. Hope something here helped.
-
_I am assuming that you are referring internal duplicate content issue. In that case, I would rather suggest you to fix them by adding canonical or by adding noindex Meta data or by specifying some rules in robots.txt file. No need to remove the forum if it is adding value to user experience. However, if you feel that your forum is getting ruled by spammers and trolls, you should take down the whole thing. I hope that it would do good to your website in the long run. _
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 to handle one section of duplicate content
Hi guys, i'm wondering if I can get some best practice advice in preparation for launching our new e-commerce website. For the new website we are creating location pages with a description and things to do which will lead the user to hotels in the location. For each hotel page which relates to the location we will have the same 'Things to do' content. This is what the content will look like on each page: Location page Location title (1-3 words) Location description (150-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) Reasons to visit location (15 words) Hotel page Hotel name and address (10 words) Short description (25 words) Reasons to book hotel (15 words) Hotel description (100-200 words) Friendly message why to visit (15 words) Hotel reviews feed from trust pilot Types of break and information (100-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) My question is how much will we penalised for having the same 'Things to do' content on say up to 10 hotels + 1 location page? In an ideal world we want to develop a piece of code which tells search engines that the original content lies on the location page but this will not be possible before we go live. I'm unsure whether we should just go and take the potential loss in traffic or remove the 'Things to do' section on hotel pages until we develop the piece of code?
Technical SEO | | CHGLTD1 -
Duplicate content on job sites
Hi, I have a question regarding job boards. Many job advertisers will upload the same job description to multiple websites e.g. monster, gumtree, etc. This would therefore be viewed as duplicate content. What is the best way to handle this if we want to ensure our particular site ranks well? Thanks in advance for the help. H
Technical SEO | | HiteshP0 -
How to deal with 80 websites and duplicated content
Consider the following: A client of ours has a Job boards website. They then have 80 domains all in different job sectors. They pull in the jobs based on the sectors they were tagged in on the back end. Everything is identical across these websites apart from the brand name and some content. whats the best way to deal with this?
Technical SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Noticed a lot of duplicate content errors...
how do I fix duplicate content errors on categories and tags? I am trying to get rid of all the duplicate content and I'm really not sure how to. Any suggestions, advice and/or help on this would be greatly appreciated. I did add the canonical url through the SEO Yoast plugin, but I am still seeing errors. I did this on over 200 pages. Thanks for any assistance in advance. Jaime
Technical SEO | | slapshotstudio0 -
Magento Multistore and Duplicate Content
Hey all, I am currently optimizing a Magento Multistore running with two store views (one per language). Now when I switch from one language to another the urls shows: mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html?___store=german&___from_store=english The same page can also be reached by just entering mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html The question is: Does Google consider this as Duplicate Content or it it nothing to worry about? Or should I just do a dynamic 301 redirect from the 1st version to the 2nd? I read about some hacks posted in diferent magento forums but as I am working for a customer I want to avoid hacks. Also setting "Add Store Code to Urls" didn't help.
Technical SEO | | dominator0 -
Duplicate content / title caused by CAPITALS
What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ). I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals Thanks Jon
Technical SEO | | jonny5123790 -
Whats with the backslash in the url adding as duplicate content?
Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850