Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

How to protect against duplicate content?

Technical SEO

594

williammarlow last edited by

I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
KeriMorgret last edited by

Is it on its own domain or subdomain? You can exclude the entire thing in robots.txt, then verify the site in GWT and request exclusion of the entire dev site.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Francisco_Meza last edited by

No index No Follow in the header.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Recurring events and duplicate content

Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer

0
Is there an percentage of duplicate content required before you should use a canonical tag?

Is there a percentage (approximate or exact) of duplicate content you should have before you use a canonical tag? Similarly how does Google handle canonical tags if the pages aren’t 100% duplicate? I've added some background and an example below; Nike Trainer model 1 – has an overview page that also links to a sub-page about cushioning, one about Gore-Tex and one about breathability. Nike Trainer model 2,3,4,5 – have an overview page that also links to sub-pages page about cushioning , Gore-Tex and breathability. In each of the sub-pages the URL is a child of the parent so a distinct page from each other e.g. /nike-trainer/model-1/gore-tex /nike-trainer/model-2/gore-tex. There is some differences in material composition, some different images and of course the product name is referred multiple times. This makes the page in the region of 80% unique.
Technical SEO | | punchseo

0
Duplicate Content: Canonicalization vs. Redirects

Hi all, I have a client that I recently started working with whose site was built with the following structure: domain.com
domain.com/default.asp Essentially, there is a /default.asp version of every single page on the site. That said, I'm trying to figure out the easiest/most efficient way to fix all the /default.asp pages...whether that be 301 redirecting them to the .com version, adding a canonical tag to every .asp page, or simply NOINDEXing the .asp pages. I've seen a few other questions on here that are similar, but none that really say which would be the easiest way to accomplish this without going through every single page... Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing

0
Duplicate page content - index.html

Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?
Technical SEO | | Collie

0
Duplicate page content

Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl

0
Duplicate Content Issue

Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz

0
API for testing duplicate content

Does anyone know a service or API or php lib to compare two (or more) pages and to return their similiarity (Level-3-Shingles). API would be greatly prefered.
Technical SEO | | Sebes

0
Duplicate content, Original source?

Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards

0