Duplicate Content Question
-
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique.
Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently?
I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue?
Thanks
Brian Clapp
-
You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page:
In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical
Hope this helps
-
its pretty awesome. Welcome
-
less than 24 hours into my seomoz pro membership and I'm already blown away - thanks for all of your assistance. Christine it appears I don't have a .htaccess file so I will follow what you wrote and create a new blank file with just that code in it...
you guys rock. I've got lots more learning to do....
Brian
-
Something that was challenging for me at first was finding .htaccess file. It should be in the root directory of where all of you website files are stored. It may be hidden or you may need to create one. If its hidden, find out how to un-hide files in your specific FTP program. If you need to create it, simply create a blank file with the name .htaccess and paste the recommendation that Ryan made.
-
Ryan thanks for your great advice. I'm the site founder but by no means a tech expert... I'm more the content guy, but I'm learning. I
understand what you have written...all except the part of where I put that code. Where do I find my .htaccess file?
-
Thank you for your great response Dave! I'm the founder of the site, but my background is more in content and I'm learning the SEO as I go, so forgive me if this is a silly follow up.
In reference to response #4 - my original designer said canonical was only on the home page, but your response sounds like it should be on every page? If so do I put the whole url for that page, or just the root? Again not an expert here so all this advice really helps me learn.
Thanks
Brian
-
- In addition to your 301 redirect issue Ryan mentioned you are internally linking to the non www version for your logo link: (this leaks juice on the redirect as well if you are going for the www version)
2 ) You really want to choose one version and go with it everywhere (be precise down to the trailing slash) - Google webmaster tools has a setting for this as well - sign up and choose your preferred setting / then save if you haven't already
-
Make the changes and check Open Site Explorer for both versions to see your links that appear the non-preferred way and see if you can contact your external linking sources to fix the issue to the preferred URL
-
I didn't see any canonical for the other pages (other than the home page) add those as well
-
Rerun OSE after your next crawl completes or use Xenu for immediate testing for the internal links - external may take a bit longer.
-
This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/
The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect adoptionhelp.org to www.adoptionhelp.org
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.adoptionhelp.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adoptionhelp.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.
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
-
Best Way to Handle Near-Duplicate Content?
Hello Dear MOZers, Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem. Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar. As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course. Add 150+ more words to each description text block Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page Any other options or suggestions? Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages. Thank you folks, Ethan
Technical SEO | | BernsteinMedicalNYC0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
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 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another question i have is, we offer Antivirus support for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
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 Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0