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
-
Is this going to be seen by google as duplicate content
Hi All, Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer in regards to this. I have been conducted a bit of analysis of our server access file to see what googlebot is doing, where it is going etc. Now firstly, I am not SEO but have an interest. What I am seeing a lot of is that we have URL's that have an extension that sets the currency that is displayed on the products so that we can conduct Adwords campaigns in other countries, these show as follows: feedurl=AUD, feedurl=USD, feedurl=EUR etc. What I can see is that google bot is hitting a URL such as /some_product, then /someproduct?feedurl=USD and then /someproduct?feedurl=EUR and then /someproduct?feedurl=AUD all after each other. Now this is the same product page and just has the price shown slightly different on each. Would this count as a duplicate content issue? Should I disavow feedurl? Any assistance that you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Video in article + Video section = Duplicate content?
Hi, I have a website that create news articles that sometime includes videos (my own videos). Those videos are accessible in the video section too, most of the time with the same title as the article but with less content. All the video pages list related videos. Should I: Canonicalize the video page to the article Add a link in the video page to the article Add a link in the article to the video page All of the above Other Thanks for the help GaB
Technical SEO | | TVFreak0 -
How to fix duplicate page content error?
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. The example of links that has duplicate page content error are http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348855 http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348852 These are not duplicate pages. There are some values that are different on both pages like listing # , equipnet tag # , price. I am not sure how do highlight the different things the two page has like the "Equipment Tag # and listing #". Do they resolve if i use some style attribute to highlight such values on page? Please help me with this as i am not really sure why seo is thinking that both pages have same content. Thanks !!!
Technical SEO | | RGEQUIPNET0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Press Releases & Duplicate Content
How do you do press releases without duplicating the content? I need to post it on my website along with having it on PR websites. But isn't that considered bad for SEO since it's duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | MercyCollege0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220 -
Multiple URLs in CMS - duplicate content issue?
So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco. Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages). However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure. However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page. Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas. I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success. How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content? Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780