Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
-
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content.
The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit.
Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 !
Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
-
Hi Jen
We are in the fortunate/crazy situation where we have a custom CMS so the actual redirects are not really a problem from a technical standpoint, it is just wondering if we should
The main site - the biggest and busiest - has a discussion board and a shop, and a blog which the others don't so the articles are about 10% of the indexed content, and about 11% are unique.. the other 2 sites, one has 0.003% unique articles and the other 1.829% ... sounds pretty bad when I put it like that!
We haven't seen a noticeable dip, just general disappointing performance, I think I will try and rope someone into doing a full CSI on the data
Have you seen anywhere that has recovered from a comparable situation? The pondering at this end was that the damage was already done, and that was that.
thanks
-
Hi Fammy!
One thing you could do is to look at the dates the Panda updates hit (http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) against your website traffic for those dates. If you see a dip, you probably got hit.
If not, it's still possible that the duplicate content is holding back your visibility in the SERPs. You can sometimes guess this when you're adding new content and it doesn't really perform as you'd expect it to - but unfortunately, you won't know for sure until you take some action.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you risk getting hit in the future - for example, by a manual penalty - which could even result in the sites being removed.
263,114 is a huge number of duplicate articles and I was just wondering what proportion that is to your overall number of site pages. If it is quite a high percentage, the risk is obviously greater.
I'd recommend you take some action personally. Is there any pattern in the way the archive of articles is structured, to make it possible to write a catch-all 301 rule in your htaccess file that redirects them all to one of the three sites?
For example say your archived articles site in a folder called archive - you'd put this in the htaccess on sites 1 and 2:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase
RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)$ http://www.yoursite3.com/archive/$1 [R=301,L]
... and this would redirect anything in the archive directory to the archive directory on site 3, assuming the file names are exactly the same.
Alternatively if that's not an option, you could look at which of the articles have decent links going to them on sites 1 and 2, redirect those to chosen site 3 and remove the rest, cutting the workload down a little.
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
-
May Faceted Navigation via ajax #parameter cause duplicated content issues?
We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters. We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point. Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?0 -
Please help - Duplicate Content
Hi, I am really struggling to understand why my site has a lot of duplicate content issues. It's flagging up as ridiculously high and I have no idea how to fix this, can anyone help me, please? Website is www.firstcapitol.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alix_SEO1 -
Duplicate Content That Isn't Duplicated
In Moz, I am receiving multiple messages saying that there is duplicate page content on my website. For example, these pages are being highlighted as duplicated: https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/pop-art-graffiti/farm-with-barn-and-animals-wall-mural-3824 and https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/animals-wildlife/little-elephants-garden-seamless-pattern-wall-mural-3614. As you can see, both pages are different products, therefore I can't apply a 301 redirect or canonical tag. What do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | e3creative0 -
How do I use public content without being penalized for duplication?
The NHTSA produces a list of all recalls for automobiles. In their "terms of use" it states that the information can be copied. I want to add that to our site, so there is an up-to-date list for our audience to see. However, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm allowed to according to NHTSA, but google will probably flag it right? Is there a way to do this without being penalized? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Penalized for Duplicate Page Content?
I have some high priority notices regarding duplicate page content on my website www.3000doorhangers.com Most of the pages listed here are on our sample pages: http://www.3000doorhangers.com/home/door-hanger-pricing/door-hanger-design-samples/ On the left side of our page you can go through the different categories. Most of the category pages have similar text. We mainly just changed the industry on each page. Is this something that google would penalize us for? Should I go through all the pages and use completely unique text for each page? Any suggestions would be helpful Thanks! Andrea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
WMT Index Status - Possible Duplicate Content
Hi everyone. A little background: I have a website that is 3 years old. For a period of 8 months I was in the top 5 for my main targeted keyword. I seemed to have survived the man eating panda but not so sure about the blood thirsty penguin. Anyway; my homepage, along with other important pages, have been wiped of the face of Google's planet. First I got rid of some links that may not have been helping and disavowed them. When this didn't work I decided to do a complete redesign of my site with better content, cleaner design, removed ads (only had 1) and incorporated social integration. This has had no effect at all. I filed a reconsideration request and was told that I have NOT had any manual spam penalties made against me, by the way I never received any warning messages in WMT. SO, what could be the problem? Maybe it's duplicate content? In WMT the Index Status indicates that there are 260 pages indexed. However; I have only 47 pages in my sitemap and when I do a site: search on Google it only retrieves 44 pages. So what are all these other pages? Before I uploaded the redesign I removed all the current pages from the index and cache using the remove URL tool in WMT. I should mention that I have a blog on Blogger that is linked to a subdomain on my hosting account i.e. http://blog.mydomain.co.uk. Are the blog posts counted as pages on my site or on Blogger's servers? Ahhhh this is too complicated lol Any help will be much appreciated! Many thanks, Mark.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nortski0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0