Is Google indexing Mp3 audio and MIDI music files? Can that cause any duplicate problems?
-
Hello,
I own virtualsheetmusic.com website and we have several thousands of media files (Mp3 and MIDI files) that potentially Google can index. If that's the case, I am wondering if that could cause any "duplicate" issues of some sort since many of such media files have exact file names or same meta information inside.
Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome!
Thank you in advance to anyone.
-
Thank you Jesse, that's pretty much what I thought, but I wanted to have someone else confirming me that.
Thank you very much, appreciated your help!
All the best,
-
I sincerely doubt it. Especially in regards to file names. Think of how many "about.html" and "index.html" pages exist... So what if the filename is the same? And meta content? I don't think Google factors that into their ranking.
Assuming this is even something they're ranking.. I'm pretty confident that none of this matters.
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
-
Old product URLs still indexed and maybe causing problems?
Hi all, Need some expertise here: We recently (3 months ago) launched a newly updated site with the same domain. We also added an SSL and dropped the www (with proper redirects). We went from http://www.mysite.com to https://mysite.com. I joined the company about a week after launch of the new site. All pages I want indexed are indexed, on the sitemap and submitted (submitted in July but processes regularly). When I check site:mysite.com everything is there, but so are pages from the old site that are not on the sitemap. These do have 301 redirects. I am finding our non-product pages are ranking with no problem (including category pages) but our product pages are not, unless I type in the title almost exactly. We 301 redirected all old urls to new comparable product, or if the product is not available anymore to the home page. For better or worse, as it turns out and prior to my arrival, in building the new site the team copied much of the content (descriptions, reviews, etc) from the old site to create the new product pages. After some frustration and research I am finding the old pages are still indexed and possibly causing a duplicate content issue. Now, I gather there is supposedly no "penalty", per se, for duplicate content but a page or site will simply not show in the SERPs. Understandable and this seems to be the case. We also sell a lot of product wholesale and it turns out many dealers are using the same descriptions we have (and have had) on our site. Some are much larger than us so I'd expect to be pushed down a bit but we don't even show in the top 10 pages...for our own product. How long will it take for Google to drop the old and rank the new as unique? I have re-written some pages but much is technical specifications and tough to paraphrase or re-write. I know I could do this in Search Console but I don't have access to the old site any longer. Should I remove the 301s a few at a time and see if the old get dropped faster? Maybe just re-write ALL the content? Wait? As a site note, I'm also on a Drupal CMS with a Shopify ecommerce module so maybe the shop.mysite.com vs mysite.com is throwing it off with the products(?) - (again the Drupal non-product AND category pages rank fine). Thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thx so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mcampanaro0 -
Duplicate Page getting indexed and not the main page!
Main Page: www.domain.com/service
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ishrat-Khan
Duplicate Page: www.domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service 1. My page was getting indexed properly in 2015 as: www.domain.com/service
2. Redesigning done in Aug 2016, a new URL pattern surfaced for my pages with parameter "products-handler"
3. One of my product landing pages had got 301-permanent redirected on the "products-handler" page
MAIN PAGE: www.domain.com/service GETTING REDIRECTED TO: www.domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service
4. This redirection was appearing until Nov 2016.
5. I took over the website in 2017, the main page was getting indexed and deindexed on and off.
6. This June it suddenly started showing an index of this page "domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service"
7. These "products-handler.php" pages were creating sitewide internal duplicacy, hence I blocked them in robots.
8. Then my page (Main Page: www.domain.com/service) got totally off the Google index Q1) What could be the possible reasons for the creation of these pages?
Q2) How can 301 get placed from main to duplicate URL?
Q3) When I have submitted my main URL multiple times in Search Console, why it doesn't get indexed?
Q4) How can I make Google understand that these URLs are not my preferred URLs?
Q5) How can I permanently remove these (products-handler.php) URLs? All the suggestions and discussions are welcome! Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
How can I remove duplicate content & titles from my site?
Without knowing I created multiple URLs to the same page destinations on my website. My ranking is poor and I need to fix this problem quickly. My web host doesn't understand the problem!!! How can I use canonical tags? Can somebody help, please.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZoeAlexander0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0