Duplicate Forum Content
-
HI everyone,
great to be here, absolutely loving everything, please go easy on me I'm quite a noob when it comes to seo, but hopefully my question isn't too basic.
After running the initial checks on my websites, I found there are 7,646 duplicate pages? Some are easy fixes but the majority are not, being forum pages, the edit, quote and new post links are coming up as duplicates of the main post?
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Best Lee
-
How delightful that you refer to Invisionpower as I recently took the software for a test drive and plan to purchase it in January
A question though that has been troubling me. I use a paid for hosting service, which forwards to one of my sub-domains. The problem is I have nearly 7k pages of duplicate content (all from the forum), I really want to add a no follow and then remove the forum pages from the search index and thus remove all of the duplicate content. Though I'm worried that adding no follow to the sub domain may impact on the main site.
I have a lot of page one search positions, many long tails which combined result in a lot of visits, but I also have a couple of short phrases that get 50% of the visits alone, so I can't risk making any changes, actually I'm pretty terrified to make any changes, just in case all of my website pages are removed from the index.
-
invisionpower forum is good choice, as i knew. Found duplicated content pages here, it happens with most of forums, but there is full provision that this can resolved by canonical or stop crawling one you don't want in robots.txt.
-
Hey
just found some valuable info which has solved a lot of my problems, modified .htaccess which has removed all of the non www links, so thats a part solve.
I think what I'm going to do is purchase the new forum software, setup a robot.txt to not crawl the new forums and then once I have all of the posts transfered to the new forum, remove the old forums from the index.
That should solve it, the new forum is very well established and if need be I can pay one of their developers to incorporate some seo feature that will stop the duplicate content issue. Once thats solved I can remove the robot.txt
Many thanks, Lee
-
Hi, still one more thing, because you sound loss, and that's not the meaning of this Q&A. Contact the forumservice and ask for the canonical, this is a very simple and common thing to do.
-
Ok thanks Leonie,
still no nearer to knowing what to do, I know theres a problem and generally what I need to do, but I'm still at a complete loss as to how to do it
But thank you for trying to help,
Best, Lee
-
Seo stuff is'nt that difficult, though it can be comlicated
Anyway I wish you luck with the forum and hope you'll manage to get it the way you wanted.
Grtz, Leonie
-
Mmmm this is becoming more problematic by the minute, will need to implement robot.txt before removing the urls.
And there was me thinking this seo stuff would be easy.
-
Lol, tha'ts also an option
under url's index, though they have to be removed first, otherwise google crawl them again. but there you can remove complete directories at once.
-
or go somewhere else lol, have been considering buying invisionpower forum for a while, this might be the final push I needed.
Is there a way of mass deleting pages from the index in webmaster tools, i.e. all links that contain edit, quote and new ect?
-
Ah okay, that will be difficult than.
Maybe you can ask them to implement the canonical url. It will be helpful for you to avoid duplicates
-
is a paid forum service, but they give you the ability to add code snippets in the head.
-
Hi Lee,
What kind of CMS are you using?
In wmt under parameters you can configure parameters. If the ur's contain the same parameter it is a posibility.
-
Hi Leonie,
thanks for taking the time to answer
Not sure if that will work, there is only one head (hope that makes sense). Forums work pretty much the same as content management systems. I have the ability to change what's contained in the head, but adding rel="canonical" will have the same effect on all pages, even the duplicate one (I think).
Is there a way of removing all pages from the index (in webmaster tools) that contain the word edit, or quote or new? Kind of like using a wild card?
-
Hi Lee,
I'm not very familiar with forums. but i think you can solve it by putting a canonical in the head.
If you have a main page, which is the post, put a canonical url in it:
the duplicate pages need to have the same canonical.
I hope this work for you.
Grtz, Leonie
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
-
Franchise-Like Duplicate Sites
I know that ideally businesses that operate as franchises should have 1 site with separate location pages. However, I have a slightly different issue. Each location is owned by a different parent company, and named accordingly. For example, there is "Location by XYZ Company" and "Location by ABC Company." In addition, each location, while carrying similar products, does not carry the same exact products and brands. So my question is how would you go about writing the content for each of these sites, keeping the same tone but avoiding duplicate content?
Content Development | | GavinAdv1 -
A good content calendar/organizer suggestion?
Does anyone have a good content calendar/organizer/software/etc to help plan delivering and pushing out content? I haven't ever used anything other than an actual calendar, and that doesn't seem to help all that much. Is there anything better out there? Any suggestions would be fantastic! Much appreciated, Ruben
Content Development | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Looking for a content marketing agency alternative to Brafton.
We've worked with Brafton for a while now and aren't happy with their service. So we're looking for an alternative content marketing agency not a digital marketing agency. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | workathomecareers0 -
SEO for a News based site : Outdated content
How do we maintain the SEO of a 5 year old News content based site? How should we deal with 3-4 year old content, which are outdated or not searched? Some of them are still useful as archiving/history of a topic..but not searched.... ?? Should we no-index them? or should we keep it like that?
Content Development | | Wpfreesetup0 -
Should we syndicate content?
Hello Mozzers! Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. The goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states. To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
Content Development | | Wayne76
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content is original. A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that only syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entires are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.) The link profile is virtually non-existent. There are approximately 6 linking domains. I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances. Not too shabby for the Flying Dutchman of accident news sites. 🙂 I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources. What the...!? The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well? While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states. Should the Panda updates have any effect on their site? Thanks, gang.... Wayne0 -
Crawl error vs RSS feed content
Hi, I have a BuddyPress Multisite with sites dedicated to specific RSS feeds. I did this to pull in the content for my users. But they generate a 1000s of SEMOZ errors/warnings for dup content, dup titles, missing metatags. etc. So does keeping the content help my site SEO less than the errors? The content is not under my control so I have no way to relate it to my keywords. Any opinions? I can recreate these RSS sites, so I will probably delete them to see what happens. Larry
Content Development | | tishimself0 -
Can forums bring down your search engine rankings?
it might be my imagination, but i could swear that after the launch of a bbpress forum and posts and replies coming from members, the site alexa website rankings actually went DOWN for a while. i always thought forums would de facto bring up rankings - more content, traffic, etc. Is it possible that forum content is considered lower quality? i remember reading that lots of new threads and such from forum members can actually hurt your rankings- is this true? i guess i'm trying to figure out: on balance, what is the impact of forums on rankings - and if there are any negative impacts, if you still want to have one, how to minimize the downside? thanks much for any help!
Content Development | | prospects0 -
Is Creating a Lot of Content A Bad SEO Strategy?
In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, he talks about how every page on your site should be at least a little linkworthy, or it is just sucking link juice from the rest of the site and not contributing any. Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy? Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords? Thanks!
Content Development | | SparkplugDigital0