Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
-
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site.
As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products).
My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this.
My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com
Robin
-
Thanks for your reply Ryan. I am going to war on the bad links and have got over half of them removed already. There are one or two quite shocking examples of the manipulative linking you describe, and when I dug deeper into those sites I was utterly appalled.
-
Hi Robin,
It is important to understand the difference between Penguin and Panda.
Penguin focuses solely on a single issue: manipulative links to your site. By far the most effective solution is to remove the bad links. Penguin does not care about whether your content is duplicated or any other aspect of your site's quality.
Panda is a different update which focuses on content quality. While it is possible your site has multiple issues, you have diagnosed your issue as Penguin and stated you experienced a major traffic drop in April 2012. If that drop was on or immediately after April 24th, and you have built manipulative links to the site, it is highly likely the issue is Penguin.
A quick review of your site's backlinks in Open Site Explorer shows a large number of links which Penguin is designed to penalize....directory links and other low quality links.
I hope this information is helpful.
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
-
Content on product category pages - does Google care?
Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?
On-Page Optimization | | BarryBuckman0 -
Duplicate content issue, across site domains (blogging)
Hi all, I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs. http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website. I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/ The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice! Ketan0 -
Duplicate Page Titles in Crawl Errors (although Google is rewriting in serps ??)
Hi Im working on a client/project and crawl report is showing thousands of dupe page titles In the case of the blog/news section its aprox 50 since aprox 50 posts and they all have the same meta-title: "Brand News | Brand" as opposed to: "Title Unique to Page/Topic/KW Relating to Content | Brand" Since these are the main content pages we want to rank (in addition to the main site category pages) then i have instructed dev must prioritise populating these pages meta-titles with the actual post/article titles, as per the latter version of the above example. (I should mention that i have requested they fix all dupe titles but main content pages are the priority). Whilst this will reduce the number of dupe titles in crawl error/warning report which is a good thing, is it actually likely to increase the ranking of these news/content pages given that Google does seem to be rewriting the titles correctly in the serps based on the page content ? Many Thanks in advance for your input
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How Can I Fix Adobe Bridge Photo Galleries and Duplicate Content?
I have used the Adobe bridge program for a number of photo galleries on a remodeling site and it is showing a large amount of duplicate titles, etc. Is there an easy fix to this? anyone?
On-Page Optimization | | DaveBrown3330 -
Suggestions to avoid duplicate content
Hi, we have about 6500 products, almost all with descriptions. SEOMOZ is showing about 2500 of them with duplicate content. The reason for this is that only one or two words are different for each product. For example, we have 500 award certificates. All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate. We have the same issue with our trophies - they are identical, except for figures. Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items? Thanks! Neil trophycentral.com
On-Page Optimization | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Duplicat page content issue I don't know how to solve
I've got a few pages (click here to see the fist on with the others as side bar links). They are all thumbnail pages of different products. The tiles are pretty different but the page content is virtually the same for all of them as is the meta description tag. I'm getting error's on the SEOmoz crawl for those pages. I know the meta tag shouldn't be a problem in SEO but is the content of the page going to cause me issues? Are the error messages from SEOmoz a result of the page content or the meta description? The pages are very similar but they are different enough that I want to separate them onto different pages. There would be too many links on that single page as well if all the thumbs where on the same page. Should I just ignore the error messages?
On-Page Optimization | | JAARON0 -
Duplicate Content Warning
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the duplicate content warnings I am recieving for some of my pages. I noticed that the below pattern of URLs are being flagged as duplicate content. I understand that these are seen as two different pages but I would like to know if this has an negative impact on my SEO? Why is this happening? How do I stop it from happening? http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html?sef_rewrite=1 http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | mozmonkey0 -
Pages with duplicate meta descriptions.
So I have similar items that is being recognized as duplicated meta description. What should I do? Here is couple of items.
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0