Load balancing - duplicate content?
-
Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site.
My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be.
The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems.
Any help is much appreciated!
-
Thanks for the advice, guys.
Much appreciated.
-
Agreed. That's what I would do too
-
Yes, you probably should.
-
Thanks for the quick reply!
Do we need to add the canonical tag to both versions of the page, i.e. on www1 and www2?
-
I think a cross domain canonical should work for this. You can then specify which is the preferred version, which will be used in the SERPs.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
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
-
Semi-duplicate content yet authoritative site
So I have 5 real estate sites. One of those sites is of course the original, and it has more/better content on most of the pages than the other sites. I used to be top ranked for all of the subdivsion names in my town. Then when I did the next 2-4 sites, I had some sites doing better than others for certain keywords, and then I have 3 of those sites that are basically the same URL structures (besides the actual domain) and they aren't getting fed very many visits. I have a couple of agents that work with me that I loaned my sites to to see if that would help since it would be a different name. My same youtube video is on each of the respective subdivision pages of my site and theirs. Also, their content is just rewritten content from mine about the same length of content. I have looked over and seen a few of my competitors who only have one site and their URL structures arent good at all, and their content isn't good at all and a good bit of their pages rank higher than my main site which is very frustrating to say the least since they are actually copy cats to my site. I sort of started the precedent of content, mapping the neighborhood, how far that subdivision is from certain landmarks, and then shot a video of each. They have pretty much done the same thing and are now ahead of me. What sort of advice could you give me? Right now, I have two sites that are almost duplicate in terms of a template and same subdivsions although I did change the content the best I could, and that site is still getting pretty good visits. I originally did it to try and dominate the first page of the SERPS and then Penguin and Panda came out and seemed to figure that game out. So now, I would still like to keep all the sites, but I'm assuming that would entail making them all unique, which seems to be tough seeing as though my town has the same subdivisions. Curious as to what the suggestions would be, as I have put a lot of time into these sites. If I post my site will it show up in the SERPS? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Veebs0 -
Magento products and eBay - duplicate content risk?
Hi, We are selling about 1000 sticker products in our online store and would like to expand a large part of our products lineup to eBay as well. There are pretty good modules for this as I've heard. I'm just wondering if there will be duplicate content problems if I sync the products between Magento and eBay and they get uploaded to eBay with identical titles, descriptions and images? What's the workaround in this case? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?
Hello Everyone, I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month. We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page. We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything. I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatchofLand0 -
Microsite as a stand-alone site under one domain and sub-domained under another: duplicate content penalty?
We developed and maintain a microsite (example: www.coolprograms.org) for a non-profit that lives outside their main domain name (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and features content related to a particular offering of theirs. They are utilizing a Google Grant to run AdWords campaigns related to awareness. They currently drive traffic from the AdWords campaigns to both the microsite (www.coolprograms.org) and their main site (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org). Google recently announced a change in their policy regarding what domains a Google Grant recipient can send traffic to via AdWords: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1657899?hl=en. The ads must all resolve to one root domain name (nonprofit-mainsite.org). If we were to subdomain the microsite (example: coolprograms.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and keep serving the same content via the microsite domain (www.coolprograms.org) is there a risk of being penalized for duplicate content? Are there other things we should be considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing-iq0 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1 -
I need to add duplicate content, how to do this without penalty
On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets. Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list. Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oznappies0