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
-
Duplicate Descriptions
Hi, Our Woo Commerce store has about 30 product tags, of which a separate page is created for each, therefore needing the usual titles and descriptions adding. I want to know if the pages will be penalised if I 90% duplicate the 150 word description for product tags that have areas of overlap. How important is this? Thanks.
Content Development | | Arnikabhupal0 -
How do you find your ideas for content
Morning Mozzers, We have finally come to the point where we can start to focus on making good original content. We were wondering how you guys come up with ideas for your content. We are currently doing lots of keyword research to gather ideas and subject areas. But we are struggling with 'angles of attack'. Being an eCommerce site it is easy to do lots of "The 5 best products for this" type of content. But we feel there is limited value in these especially if we want to gain links to our articles in future as valued content. How do you come up with your ideas for more valuable and linkable content especially in very niche product areas. Thanks all.
Content Development | | ATP1 -
Content Writing Service Recommendations
I am looking to hire a content writer for our sites. Anyone familiar with a service where the manage the content on your site? Basically, come up with topics & content ideas, then writing the content. Please give me an idea of the pricing if possible. Greatly appreciate any help.
Content Development | | inhouseseo0 -
Blog Content
I keep reading that a steady stream of new blogs from my site is a great way for getting inbound links to my site. My question is... Does the content of my blogs have to be relevant to my site? My site is www.marblerenovation.com. If the blog should stay relevant, I am finding it pretty hard to create engaging content around cleaning marble floors. Also, does anyone know of a good place to find bloggers to help create this content? Thanks in advance everyone Dave
Content Development | | david.smith.segarra0 -
Is there a way to automate finding low quality content on your site?
Hi all, I have a site that was once #1 for many keywords. Fast forward a number of years and I am sinking lower and lower and it really started to sink low from September 2012 and appears to be due to an algo update. How should I go about finding my low quality pages? I am told that I might have pages bringing my entire site down. I deleted heaps of low quality pages but not seeing any improvements (might be a little impatient). Any tips for finding bad content?
Content Development | | BatmanGoonie0 -
Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog
EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand. I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content. Please bear with me. I am adept technically. I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology. So I’m trying to attack problems one at time. Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles ** We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles. We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog. Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages. We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same. http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5 Page Title = Site Name http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10 Page Title = Site Name A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc. Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates. What is the best practice / approach? Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages? Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles? Other thoughts?
Content Development | | Romana0 -
Issues with copying online forum reviews on own website
Apologies- I asked a similar question the other day but did not word it as clearly as possible. We are looking at having a text box of 'What customers say' on our product pages using reviews written about us online (to remain factual) and wanted to know if this created any issues relating to search engines finding matching content on two separate websites? Will this have any SEO implications as effectively we are 'plagiarising' the content in the eyes of the bots even though it is just customer opinion of our own products right? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | jannkuzel0 -
How to best take advantage of content being used on another site?
We've never syndicated content or done "article marketing". Another site contacted us and requested to use the content on several of our webpages. The other site is a fairly prestigious nonprofit in our industry. We don't mind them using our content, but we want to get the most benefit out of it. There are two ways the occur to me: Have them create pages with the exact same text as on our pages, but put in the header of those pages Just have them create pages with the text from our pages with embedded links back to our other pages. Each page they create will say "Content courtesy of XXX" Does anyone have opinions on which way is best, or another approach?
Content Development | | DanCrean0