Www.xyz.com v/s xyz.com creating duplicate pages
-
I just put my site in moz analytics. The crawl results says I have duplicate content. When I look at the pages it is because one page is www.xyz.com and the duplicate is xyz.com. What causes this and how can it be fixed. I'm not a developer, so be kind and speak a language I can understand.
Thanks for your help
-
Hi Viresh,
The 301 redirect option is perfect, and so is using the canonical tag to point one "version" of the site to the other if you would rather do that - instructions for doing that are here. Just make sure, as you would with the redirect, the the canonical tag points on a page-by-page basis. That is, xyz.com/page31.html has a canonical tag on it pointing to www.xyz.com/page31.html, not to www.xyz.com/.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Yes, when you setup a website normally, this will usually be a default issue that needs to be addressed. It's an overall problem (though easy to fix) that has yet to be addressed. So, no, it's not your fault -- but it's on you and every other site owner to fix it.
-
The 'default' setup will be for no redirects to be in place. It's not that something was done incorrectly, but rather, a best practice for SEO was overlooked. It's not something your average Joe or webmaster with no SEO experience is likely going to.
-
I don't currently know which one is linked to more often. I will look into that. Thanks for that little tip and your fast response.
-
I get that!! Does this happen when a site is built? Does it just happen by default, or was something not done correctly when the site was built?
Thanks for your quick response
-
In your scenario, you will want to choose one or the other, and setup a force WWW (or non-WWW) 301 redirect. If your site is on a linux-based platform, that is accomplished with an htaccess file. If you are on a Windows-based server, you will need to use IIS (I think). A simple Google search for "force www redirect windows server" will likely return tons of solutions.
If you're on Wordpress or a similar CMS, it is usually very easy to do from within the backend. If you have no idea what server you're on, or what platform your site is built on, use builtwith.com to find out
How do you choose between www.example.com or just example.com? You'll want to go with the one that's linked to more often, and then work on sticking with that as often as possible in the future. The majority of the link juice that's pointing towards example.com will be transfered to www.example.com with the 301 redirect, so it's not like those links without WWW will be worthless. They only lose a very tiny amount of their value through the redirect. The good news is, you're fixing a big issue so it isn't going to get worse for you.
Let me know if you have more questions.
-
I hope this isn't too technical, but just do a 301 redirect from either www.xyz.com to xyz.com or vice versa (your choice) for all pages on your website. That should solve the issue! (You can and should also set one of those as the canonical domain in Google Webmaster Tools.)
If that doesn't make sense, just reply!
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
-
Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)
I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL. Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna. Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this: Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Creating a Landing Page with a Separate Domain to Control Bounce Rate
I work with a unique situation where we have a site that gets tons of free traffic from internal free resources. We do make revenue from this traffic, but due to its nature, it has a high bounce rate. Data shows that once someone from this source does click a second page, they are engaged, so they either bounce or click multiple pages. After testing various landing pages, I've determined that the best solution would be to create a landing page on a separate domain and hide it from the search engines (to prevent duplicate content and the appearance of link farming). The theory is that once they click through to the site, they will bounce at a lower rate and improve the stats of the website. The landing page would essentially filter out this bad traffic. My question is, how sound is this theory? Will this cause any issues with Google or any other search engines?
Technical SEO | | jhacker0 -
Unavoidable duplicate page
Hi, I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g. domain.com/service1/product-x domain.com/service2/product-x Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Stuart
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
.com & .ie website how to avoid duplicate blog content?
We have 2 websites .com & .ie (both are more or less identical except 2 different markets). How can I avoid duplicate blog content as lots of our .com/blog and .ie/blog is the same? Maybe.... Our main .com blog articles are searchable then on our .ie blog content non searchable? (This way both markets get to view the content but only Google actually searches our .com blog) Alliteratively I would need to rewrite each article so that is unique Advise would be appreciated, thank you.
Technical SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
Duplicate Home Page Fix Doesnt Work :-(
Good Afternoon from 16 degrees C 85% Humidity Wetherby UK... Having ran a screaming from report for www.davidclick.com the tool diagnosed there was two versions of the home page and here are the 2 urls for the home page: www.davidclick.com
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
www.davidclick.com/index.htm I leaped into action and added this line of code into the head section of www.davidclick.com/index.htm and hers it is:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/canonical-code.jpg But why when i run a screaming frog report its still telling me there are two versions of thye home page. Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0