Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
-
Dear All
I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com
I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with.
Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too.
It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www
It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead?
Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong)
All the best
Matt
-
Hi, according to Google's official documentation canonical URLs are sufficient:
"In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. For example:... Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www subdomain or the https protocol..."
Proposed Plan of Action:
- Decide which of non-www or www should be your preferred domain. Set the canonical urls and the preferred domain in GWT accordingly.
- Divide your site into dozen or so sections and every day for the next 2 weeks correct the duplicate titles and content of each section. At the end, leave a day to go over the work and at the start give yourself a day to get familiar with the work. So you will not be overwhelmed by the details, even if you don't finish everything in a day.
- See how the work done affects your sitemap and overall SEO when you go forward. If possible, only implement changes to the CMS after this SEO work has been done. Why? Because by then you will be familiar enough with the CMS and with the goals you want to achieve to fruitfully communicate with the developers. I see you are running a CMS based on ASP.net — changing these boutique CMS-s can be quite expensive, as you stated
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 content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps
duplicate content issue: staging url has been indexed by google ( many pages) and need to know how to remove them from the serps. Bing sees the staging url as moved permanently Google sees the staging urls (240 results) and redirects to the correct url Should I be concerned about duplicate content and request Google to remove the staging url removed Thanks Guys
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Duplicate Content Brainstorming
Hi, New here in the SEO world. Excellent resources here. We have an ecommerce website that sells presentation templates. Today our templates come in 3 flavours - for PowerPoint, for Keynote and both - called Presentation Templates. So we've ended up with 3 URLS with similar content. Same screenshots, similar description.. Example: https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/social-media-keynote-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/social-media-powerpoint-template https://www.improvepresentation.com/presentation-templates/social-media-presentation-template I know what you're thinking. Why not make a website with a template and give 3 download options right? But what about https://www.improvepresentation.com/powerpoint-templates/ https://www.improvepresentation.com/keynote-templates/ These are powerfull URL's in my opinion taking into account that the strongest keyword in our field is "powerpoint templates" How would you solve this "problem" or maybe there is no problem at all.
Technical SEO | | slidescamp0 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Duplicate Content from Google URL Builder
Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?
Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0