Dulpicate Content being reported
-
Hi
I have a new client whose first MA crawl report is showing lots of duplicate content.
The main batch of these are all the HP url with an 'attachment' part at the end such as:
www.domain.com/?attachment_id=4176
As far as i can tell its some sort of slide show just showing a different image in the main frame of each page, with no other content. Each one does have a unique meta title & H1 though.
Whats the best thing to do here ?
-
Not a problem and leave as is
-
Use the paremeter handling tool in GWT
-
Canonicalise, referencing the HP
or other solution ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
-
Hi Dan,
Actually it looks like ctrl L will do it (you are creating an excel table). You usually need to erase the first few rows from the export so you have the column header in row 1 and then select all and create the table checking the 'my table has headers' so that you can then filter using the headers
-
Sorry Lynn but what is the 'windows' bit in control-windows-L since cant see on my keyboard, can it have a different icon/symbol etc?
-
Great stuff thanks Lynn !! Ill tell their dev to do that
many many thanks
All Best
Dan
-
cool cheers Don
-
Hi Dan,
The robots must be getting the urls from somewhere so it is worth finding out where. If you download the moz report in csv and open in excel you can control-windows-L to get a filterable list. If you filter for duplicates and find these urls on the left then on the far right it should reference where they are being linked from. I suspect you will find pages in the site that have these images in them and are linking to the attachment_id urls (often it is from gallery pages).
Once you have found the pages, then try applying the yoast redirects and see if they work as expected (ie redirect the attachment_id links to the relevant gallery page for example). Ideally you would get rid of the links completely from the code - this will probably need a bit of dev work on the template but should be pretty straightforward since you are likely just removing the A tag from around the images.
-
Gotcha, definitely don't want to nix pages then. I would imagine Lynn's response is more appropriate then, it is likely that he is using a plugin that has been updated to better SEO practices that he hasn't yet updated.
-
Many thanks Don
ill ask client but dont think so (doubt any links pointing to them) but due to varying kw rich meta titles and h1's think client may have implemented this for some seo reason (hes very seo savvy but bit old school) prob not aware needs more content on page beyond a pic & some meta & an h1.
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
All Best
Dan
-
Thanks Lyn
Yes it is wp i think
If i click on the image it loads page with image (another duplicate) in the series next
I'm not sure what the normal page is since can only find these via the cralw reports, they dont seem to be linked to in any site nav etc
Does that sound to you then like best solution is via Yoast redirects etc ?
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
If these pages have no SEO value then you can just stop them from being crawled, thus preventing any duplicate content penalties. If you see some backlinks (SEO value) to any of these then I would use Canonical.
robots.txt
User-agent:: *
Disallow: /*attachment_id
Hope it helps,
Don
-
Hi Dan,
Is the site running wordpress? If so it sounds like maybe a badly coded template which is showing links somewhere in the code to the attachments (if you click on the image in its normal page does it take you to the duplicate url you mention?). It would be best to find out where the linking is happening and correct it so the links are removed if at all possible. The Yoast plugin also has a setting where you can redirect attachment ids to their related post (its in the permalinks settings of the yoast plugin) - that might help solve the problem.
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
-
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
How do I deal with Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm trying SEOMOZ and its saying that i've got loads of duplicate content. We provide phone numbers for cities all over the world, so have pages like this... https://www.keshercommunications.com/Romaniavoipnumbers.html https://www.keshercommunications.com/Icelandvoipnumbers.html etc etc. One for every country. The question is, how do I create pages for each one without it showing up as duplicate content? Each page is generated by the server, but Its impossible to write unique text for each one. Also, the competition seem to have done the same but google is listing all their pages when you search for 'DID Numbers. Look for DIDWW or MyDivert.
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
Content is king, is it okay if its in a widget?
My home page for my site, isn't really a home page, not sure how to describe that. We have additional pages that are stand alone pages which we work on and add content too, just not for the main page. So I have put my 300 words in a widget on the front page (which actually shows up on all the page being a widget. Is that good for SEO, or should it be in the body of a page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
How to fix duplicate page content error?
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. The example of links that has duplicate page content error are http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348855 http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348852 These are not duplicate pages. There are some values that are different on both pages like listing # , equipnet tag # , price. I am not sure how do highlight the different things the two page has like the "Equipment Tag # and listing #". Do they resolve if i use some style attribute to highlight such values on page? Please help me with this as i am not really sure why seo is thinking that both pages have same content. Thanks !!!
Technical SEO | | RGEQUIPNET0 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0 -
404-like content in webmaster tools
Hello this is so strange i have just noticed when looking in webmastertools there are some pages of our website it is showing like 404-like content but in reality the page is getting 200 response and it is good. but why does google read that as 404-like content! we have product information and image of the product and even buy button in the page.. not only product pages but also for some content pages it showing 404-like content! thanks in advance for your valuable opinions on the topic..
Technical SEO | | idreams0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780