Www.colourbanners.co.uk/ & colourbanners.co.uk showing up as two seperate URLs - is this going to be dupliacte content issue?

[gezzagregz]

Hi Guys,

I have just created a report in Moz and there appears to be 91 duplicate content issues with the site which i need to fix as i think it could be the reason why we are suffering from a penalty.

One of the main questions i have is these 3 variations of the URL

http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/ http://colourbanners.co.ukhttp://colourbanners.co.uk/Each have links pointing to them. My question is, could this be causing a dupe issue?regardsGerry

[SEM-Freak]

in essence it tells Google it is that page so removes it from the index

[gezzagregz]

many thanks Geoff,

so by putting <link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical</a>" href="http://www.colourbanners.co.uk"> in the head of

http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/index.htm tells Google that the latter is a dupe?

Just want to make sure i have it right,

Cheers

[GPainter]

Take a look in Majestic SEO

It may also be in your webmaster tools

[gezzagregz]

HI Chris,When looking at on-site explorer i only get 472 links in total? im confused now

regards

Gerry

[SEM-Freak]

Chris is right. The issue is that you won't have control of which version gets in the results - which one people link to or share via social media. You won't get a penalty but you would be best to get rid of the duplicates using 301s and rel=canonical - this will get the issue sorted the quickest and the page will get the maximum benefit from shares and links.

be careful with rel=canonical

your homepage would be: <link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical</a>" href="http://www.colourbanners.co.uk">

then lower page 1: <link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical</a>" href="http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/lower-page-1.htm">

then lower page 2: <link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical</a>" href="http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/lower-page-2.htm">

do not put the same tag across all pages

[GPainter]

All though maybe a factor I doubt its the larger reason, I'd look into your profile further you've got 15k of links from gfoods.org.uk which isn't going to be helping you.

It also depends how competitive your terms are.

[gezzagregz]

thanks.

I will apply the rel=cal too. The site www.colourbanners.co.uk dropped off the face of the earth for many of its key terms,

Although still ranking from the brand name.

No manual actions in WMT and the link profile is quite natural (brand name is the majority)

Could this dupe content be the key?

Your opinions and thoughts are welcome

[GPainter]

Can take a while to deinxed though the 301 will work before then. I wouldn't worry about the duplicate content so much Google pretty cleaver, having said that rel=canonical won't hurt you either.

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459

"“I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing." - Matt Cutts

*Edit Yes Gez that would then go in the head of each page

[gezzagregz]

Hi geoff,

thanks for your response. So a 301 may not be enough?

I want al pages with the www. to be the origional pages so would i apply the following to any duplicated pages;

<link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical</a>" href="http:www.colourbanners.co.uk">

(i.e. thi tag would be added to the other dupe home pages)??

your help is much appreciated

[SEM-Freak]

With Google it depends on a range of factors. The URLs will be removed from the index once Google crawls them again.

If I was you I would still implement <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="full URL of page"> in the head section - note the URL should be the www version of the page and must change to the URL of the page you are on.

Have no idea how long Moz takes.

[gezzagregz]

Thanks for the advice everyone

I 301 redirected alot of pages as it appeared that each page of the site had 2 URL variations.

Will Google auto de-index these duplicated URLs? How long does it take? I only just put the redirect on but the duplicate issue is still showing as an issue in MOZ (when does MOZ update?)regards,

Gerry

[SEM-Freak]

you'll need to 301 redirect http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/index.htm and http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/index.html to http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/ to avoid duplicate homepages

[GPainter]

No they are not, if you rel=canonical on the main one it will help solve any issues, you shouldn't redirect into http://abc.com/ rather the other way but that is preference.

in short rel=canonical will stop any duplicate content issues.

[MoeezLodhi]

Good question; I was wondering the same if http://www.abc.com/ and http://www.abc.com the same? 
When I use the tool site explorer it displays results from http://www.abc.com/ but results are generated for http://www.abc.com as well.. 
Kinldy let me know how to solve this issue?

A simple redirect of http://www.abc.com to http://abc.com/ will solve the issue?

"http://www.abc.com is just an example"

[GPainter]

Hi Gerry,

Best practice is to redirect into one main site so lets say your main side is http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/

We would then redirect http://colourbanners.co.uk into the other (or visa versa) and yes it can cause duplicate content issues, you can also as a safety precaution set up rel=canonical on the main page too.

~More info here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

Good luck!