Duplicate content - working with CMS constraints
-
Hi,
We use an industry-specific CMS and I'm struggling to figure out how we can fix duplicate content issues.
Thankfully, the vendor has agreed to work on 301 vs 302 redirects.
However, they aren't currently able to give us the ability to add rel=canonical tags to page headers (we've put it in their "suggestion box" which tends to take a long time, if ever, to materialize).
My understanding is that the tag will not be recognized if it's in the body code, correct? (aka the part of the page we can edit from the CMS)
Is there anything else I can do?
-
You're very welcome, we're all in this google together.
I know that issue all too well, happens a lot with sitemap pages, sites that don't declare one type or url structure so they have site.com/ and site.com.
I'm kinda surprised the CMS doesn't redirect the url when you create the friendly url, but glad they agreed to work on it, I would utilize your best offense and get the other customers of the CMS to upvote and squeak their wheels. Since this also seems like a case of a CMS missing crucial features for site growth.
If they don't fix this promptly, consider if possible a switch to a more commonly used CMS like Drupal, Wordpress or even Joomla, all are established for years with these kinda issues already worked out and in some cases extra addons to help assist. But understand, often the choice of CMS isn't always up to us.
It does seem like for now, best you can do is try and reduce what you can on that page, but could be that the issue will keep presenting itself until the root cause is contained.
-
Thanks for your replies!!
There are a few instances of duplicate content where we can actually delete, but mostly it's many URLs going to the same page due to the structure of the site, ie:
http://www.sanjuan.edu/Domain/2396 (this is the URL for the "section" that houses many pages)
http://www.sanjuan.edu/Page/4808 (this is the URL for the page)
http://www.sanjuan.edu/family (this is the friendly URL that we've created that in an ideal world we'd have be the rel=canonical)
I will ask other districts using the CMS to upvote my suggestion in the vendor's suggestion box...I guess that may be the best I can do...
-
Ahh yes, this is a very niche product, they just haven't had enough users to bring up all the various features that are desired. Or just don't understand SEO and how to develop for it, which is something many CMS providers have dealt with or are dealing with.
From reading through the editor guide pdf, seems it really gives you the basic options of site editing, no backend or much frontend control in that aspect either.
Can I ask why the duplicate content can't be deleted? Is it that it's one content piece but being displayed on various pages? If it's not too much content being duplicated, you might be ok.
-
We're a K-12 and use a CMS called Schoolwires: http://www.schoolwires.com/
(I'm worried since it's so niche we might be out of luck...)
-
Yes you're right, needs to be in the header,
What CMS is this? The resulting answer would be what determines the possible alternatives. Drupal was one I worked with for a few years and still do, modules and some template editing was what solves some SEO issues I've had experience with. But again, not all CMS are created equal.
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 warning for a hierarchy structure?
I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
Technical SEO | | westsaddle
The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!0 -
Video in article + Video section = Duplicate content?
Hi, I have a website that create news articles that sometime includes videos (my own videos). Those videos are accessible in the video section too, most of the time with the same title as the article but with less content. All the video pages list related videos. Should I: Canonicalize the video page to the article Add a link in the video page to the article Add a link in the article to the video page All of the above Other Thanks for the help GaB
Technical SEO | | TVFreak0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Product Duplicate Content Issue with Google Shopping
I have a site with approx 20,000 products. These products are resold to hundreds of other companies and are fed from one database therefore the content is duplicated many many times. To overcome this, we are launching the site with noindex meta tags on all product pages. (In phase 2 we will begin adding unique content for every product eek) However, we still want them to appear in Google Shopping. Will this happen or will it have to wait until we remove the noindex tags?
Technical SEO | | FGroup0 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0 -
Multiple URLs in CMS - duplicate content issue?
So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco. Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages). However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure. However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page. Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas. I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success. How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content? Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Duplicate content check picking up weird urls
Hi everyone, I love the duplicate content feature; we have a lot of duplicate content issues due to the way our site is structured. So, we're working on them. However, I'm not fully understanding the results. For example, say I have an article on breast cancer symptoms. It shows up as duplicate content, by having two urls that point to the exact same page. http://www.healthchoices.ca/articles/breast cancer symptoms and http://www.healthchoices.ca/somerandomstringofcode. I fully understand why that is duplicate content. I am not sure about this though, it picks up the same url twice and calls it duplicate content. For example, saying that http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so and http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so is duplicate...however is this not the same page? Is there something I'm missing? Many of the URL's are identical. Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0