Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
-
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain.
Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm.
There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case?
- use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site
2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk
In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best.
Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
-
It's a little tricky. While Andrea is right about Robots.txt - it's not great for removal once pages/domains are indexed, you can block the sub-domain with robots.txt and then request removal in Google Webmaster Tools (you need to create a separate account for the sub-domain itself). That's often the fastest way to remove something from the index, and if it has no search value, I might go that route. Just proceed with caution - it's a delicate procedure.
Doing 1-to-1 canonicalization or adding 301 redirects may be the next strongest signal (NOINDEX is a bit weaker, IMO). However, Google will have to re-crawl the sub-domain to do that, so you'll need to keep the paths open.
-
First, if the pages are already indexed then a robots.txt won't make them go away. A meta tag no index on the pages is the better solution. This allows search engines to "read" you page, see the no index tag and then work to remove the pages from index. A robots.txt doesn't necessarily accomplish the same result.
-
If you can do a 1-to-1 page canonicalization (each page on .co.uk is canonicaled to the equivalent page on the .com) then I would do that.
Otherwise, I would noindex the backup site.
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
-
Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.
Hi guys, We're planning on starting a Saas based service where we'll be selling different skins. Let's say WordPress themes, though it's not about that. Say we have an url called site.com/ and we would like to direct all seo juice to the mother landing page /best-wp-themes/ but then have that juice flow towards our additional pages: /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozify
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes
/best-wp-themes/?id=Fiximoz /best-wp-themes/?id=Mozicom Challenges: 1. our content would be formatted like this:
a. Same content - features b. Same content - price c. Different content - each theme will have its own set of features / design specs. d. Same content - testimonials. How would be go about not being penalised by SE's for the duplicate content, but still have the /?id=whatever pages be indexed with proper content? 2. How do we go about making sure SEO juice flows to the /?id pages too?Basically it's the same thing with different skins. Thanks for the help!0 -
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
Cache and index page of Mobile site
Hi, I want to check cache and index page of mobile site. I am checking it on mobile phone but it is showing the cache version of desktop. So anybody can tell me the way(tool, online tool etc.) to check mobile site index and cache page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Incorrect URL shown in Google search results
Can anyone offer any advice on how Google might get the url which it displays in search results wrong? It currently appears for all pages as: <cite>www.domainname.com › Register › Login</cite> When the real url is nothing like this. It should be: www.domainname.com/product-type/product-name. This could obviously affect clickthroughs. Google has indexed around 3,000 urls on the site and they are all like this. There are links at the top of the page on the website itself which look like this: Register » Login » which presumably could be affecting it? Thanks in advance for any advice or help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagada0 -
Problem with description on Google search results.
A few months ago I changed the description of one of the pages on my site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
And I noticed that Google does not display the entire description of his search results. Description page is: "Get yourself a personalized name necklace, we offer a huge range of silver, gold and gold plated name necklaces." And Google only shows this line: "Get yourself a personalized name necklace, we offer a huge ... " Did someone have an idea why is that? 2EPSLGX.png0 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0