Duplicate Content?
-
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.)
But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it?
Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
-
Cool. No worries
StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.
If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect
You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Yes, on Google webmaster...sorry. And it's apache.
thank u!
-
Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.
That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.
Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!
Mike
-
HI Mike,
Thank you. To change all the titles is a huge task, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think I'll put them in a folder and mark the page link to that folder with a nofollow. As to the canoncalization of the two names, I have marked one of them as the top one in Google Analytics. But I have a much greater problem than that. I have several domain names that are on the same server and that all point to the one domain (same files and folders). I have been attempting to get my server techs to do a 301 redirect so that only http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com displays in a browser. However, every time they attempt to do it, part or all of my site stops working correctly.
-
You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.
I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com
The issue with this, that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.
As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.
Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results. The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.
If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.
That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.
The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!
I hope that helps.
Mike
-
thank u. I'm gonna do that!
-
Hi Mike,
That was fast. I copied some of the report from Seomoz "Crawled Diagnostics." Some do have the same titles, which was an edition after many years. The early newsletters I didn't even title, so they have a "default title" of the url.
I happened on SEOmoz, because I am trying to figure out why after so many years of having been on the first or second page of Google search results, we are lucky to show up on page 10 or deeper, if at all.
So I'm trying out SEOmoz to see if this will help us get back on top!
|
The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr10.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr08.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr09.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Feb06.html
-
Hi Sarah,
If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.
What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?
Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.
The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.
If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.
... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.
Hope this helps,
Mike
-
The best way to go is to put all your newsletters in on folder and and disallow the folder in your robot.txt.
rel nofollow & robot.txt are only read by google bot, your visitors won't be affected and will be able to navigate & search the archives without problem.
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
-
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
What is the Impact of Duplicate Content on Multiple Managed Property Domains?
Hi Moz Community! Our team is having an internal (and external) debate regarding the extent and implications of duplicate content for a hospitality client that I would love to get some feedback on. I unfortunately cannot divulge the brand/URL, but will give as much info as possible. The brand in question manages dozens of properties in the US and worldwide and has recently rolled up all of the domains under a singular brand.com domain. So whereas the properties used to have their own domains (property1.com, property2.com, etc...), they are now housed in sub-folders (brand.com/property1, brand.com/property2.com and so forth). The concern we have is that they launched the new brand site with all of the property sites/content rolled up under the new brand.com domain, however all of the individual property sites and their pages are still live as well. All of the canonicals on both brand.com as well as property1.com (property2.com, property3.com, etc...) are self-referencing (so the canonicals for brand.com/property1 and all of its sub-ages do not point to the still live property1.com and all of its sub-pages, for example). On the brand side, they believe this is the best path forward as brand.com grows and gains some authority, with the later intent on eventually redirecting the individual property domains - but we are unclear of that timeline (though we do think its more months as opposed to days/weeks) So our questions for the community here are: What is the perceived impact in this state of limbo to the individual property sites (ideally they house the original content and have the history, but could Google still give preference to the brand.com/property URLs and/or could both of them suffer in rank/search experience from the duplicate content an non-uniform presentation?) Could brand.com be "dinged" so-to-speak due to launching with this much duplicate content? (And if so, could that affect how quickly normalization occurs after the property sites are finally redirected?) Anything else we should consider/Any other feedback from the community? Thank you all for your time and support!
Technical SEO | | imiJoe0 -
Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us. Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Chris6610 -
How should I deal with "duplicate" content in an Equipment Database?
The Moz Crawler is identifying hundreds of instances of duplicate content on my site in our equipment database. The database is similar in functionality to a site like autotrader.com. We post equipment with pictures and our customers can look at the equipment and make purchasing decisions. The problem is that, though each unit is unique, they often have similar or identical specs which is why moz (and presumably google/bing) are identifying the content as "duplicate". In many cases, the only difference between listings are the pictures and mileage- the specifications and year are the same. Ideally, we wouldn't want to exclude these pages from being indexed because they could have some long-tail search value. But, obviously, we don't want to hurt the overall SEO of the site. Any advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | DohenyDrones0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Tired of finding solution for duplicate contents.
Just my site was scanned by seomoz and seen lots of duplicate content and titles found. Well I am tired of finding solutions of duplicate content for a shopping site product category page. You can see the screenshot below. http://i.imgur.com/TXPretv.png You can see below in every link its showing "items_per_page=64, 128 etc.". This happened in every category in which I was created. I am already using Canonical add-on to avoid this problem but still it's there. You can check my domain here - http://www.plugnbuy.com/computer-software/pc-security/antivirus-internet-security/ and see if the add-on working correct. I recently submitted my sitemap to GWT, so that's why it's not showing me any report regarding duplicate issues. Please help ME
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
How much to change to avoid duplicate content?
Working on a site for a dentist. They have a long list of services that they want us to flesh out with text. They provided a bullet list of services, we're trying to get 1 to 2 paragraphs of text for each. Obviously, we're not going to write this off the top of our heads. We're pulling text from other sources and trying to rework. The question is, how much rephrasing do we have to do to avoid a duplicate content penalty? Do we make sure there are changes per paragraph, sentence, or phrase? Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | ericmccarty0 -
Duplicate content?
I have a question regarding a warning that I got on one of my websites, it says Duplicate content. I'm canonical url:s and is also using blocking Google out from pages that you are warning me about. The pages are not indexed by Google, why do I get the warnings? Thanks for great seotools! 3M5AY.png
Technical SEO | | bnbjbbkb0