Help With Duplicated Content
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am having some issue's with duplicated content, i recently removed the .html from all of our links and moz has reported it as being duplicated.
I have been reading up about Canonicalization and would to verify some details, when using the
canonical
tag would it be placed in the /mywebpage.html or /mywebpage file?I am having a hard time to sort this out so any help from you SEO experts would be great
I have also updated my htaccess file with the following
Thanks in advance
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks so much for your prompt reply, i will get those tags updated and await some help with the 301.
Is there anyone who could maybe help me out with the 301 redirect?
Thanks again
Alec
-
Hi there Alec
Regarding the canonical tag:
The tag you want to use should be the page that you want to keep, be identified as the original and want Google to rank. From what I gather, that would be this page: http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service
Therefore, on that page, you should have a canonical tag pointing to http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service - and on every subsequent duplicate page, you should have the same tag.
The tag effectively instructs Google to say "these other pages are duplicate versions of this URL, so I'm going to ignore those versions, not flag them as a problem, and just promote the original URL. What's the original URL? Here it is, it's http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/funeral-order-of-service"
Sometimes making a robot appear human actually helps, ha!
An even better solution, which I believe you're trying to implement, would be to 301 redirect all of the URLs containing .html to their equivalent page without the .html extension in the URL. Not only does this remove the duplicate content problem, but it will also pass the SEO strength of the pages to the new one.
Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to help you there - don't want to recommend the wrong thing and mess up the .htaccess file! Hopefully someone more proficient in .htaccess redirects will come along and help you out there.
Hope my canonical explanation helps though!
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 for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content
I've been a Pro Member for nearly a year and I am bound and determined to finally clean up all the crawl errors on our site PracticeRange.com. We have 180 errors for Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content. I fixed many of the pages that were product pages with duplicate content. Those product descriptions were edited and now have unique content. However, there remain plenty of the errors that are puzzling. Many of the errors reference the same pages, for example, the Home Page, Login Page and the Search page (our catalog pages).
On-Page Optimization | | AlanWills
In the case of the Catalog Page errors, these type pages would have the same title every time "Search" and the results differ according to category. http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=6
http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=15 If this is rel=canonical issue, how do I fix it on a search result page? I want each of the different category type pages to be indexed. One of them is no more important than the other. So how would I incorporate the rel=canonical? In the case of the Home Page errors, I'm really confused. I don't know where to start to fix these. They are the result of a 404 error that leads to the home page. Is the content of the 404 page the culprit since it contains a link to the home page? Here are examples of the Home Page type of crawl errors. http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/~/Assets/ProductImages/products/Golf-Training-Aids/Rubber-Wooden-Tee-Holder.aspx http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/~/Assets/ProductImages/products/Golf-Training-Aid/Impact-Bag.aspx Thanks , Alan WillsPracticeRange.com0 -
Duplicate page title - blogs
Hope someone can help me, I am a total SEO noivce so please be gentle. My first report shows that I have duplicate page titles. I have been through and changed all of these so they are different and after my latest crawl they are still showing as duplicates. I am wondering if this is because it;s a blog, here is one of the duplicates: http://www.cottagesoapcompany.co.uk/blog/?row=1 Hope you can help!
On-Page Optimization | | emmamoulden0 -
Duplicate content from category pages?
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link? Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too? What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content? All answers are very much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Would adding noindex help?
I had completely forgotten that I have about 20 pages of content on my site that is an exact duplicate of other sites (i.e. obtained from PLR site). I really do not want to delete these pages as they do get a lot of visitors (or did before last algo updates). These visitors are not from organic search but have navigated to the pages from within my site. Question is should I a) add noindex to these pages and then ask google to remove them from index or b) try to rewrite them Many Thanks Simon
On-Page Optimization | | spes1230 -
Silo and content
I'm about to launch my site but I have a question regarding content and silo structure. If I don't have enough content to fill 4 subpages, could it be better to have only a content-keyword-rich landing page for a silo instead of multiple pages with poor content? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | mediodigital0 -
Duplicate page content & title for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php?
Hi, First post so please be gentle! My Crawl Diagnostics Summary is showing an error relating to duplicate page content and duplicate page title for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php which are, in my view, the same thing/page? Could anyone shed any light please? Thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Carl2870 -
Duplicate content on homepage?
Hi I have just created a new campaign and it states that I have duplicate page content which would affect search rankings. Basically it is counting my site www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php as two seperate pages. How can I make it so that only www.mydomain.com is visible reducing the duplicate content issue? Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | idv0