Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
-
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example."
Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate.
Thanks for you help!
-
Thanks for marking those good answers, William. I'm so glad they were helpful to you!
-
Hey Eric,
Your last answer was very helpful, thank you! We were able to fix the redirects so the "www.company.com" pages redirected to the "company.com" pages, or so we thought. Our last crawl is showing us that on top of the duplicate page issues we know have "11% of site pages served 404 errors during the last crawl."
Do you have any insights on where we might have gone wrong?
Thanks again!
-
Hi William, thanks for your question! You've received some great responses. Did any help you solve your problem? If so, please mark one or both as "good answers." And if not, please give us an update on the issue you are dealing with, thanks!
Christy
-
Hi William,
Just as Eric said, it's like a problem triggered by the wordpress CMS.
I know 3 different ways to solve this problem:1- Using a plugin, that creates a redict 301.
2- Creating a redirection pattern in the .htaccess file. Here more info:
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com) - Q&A Moz.com
3- In the case that redirects cannot be done, use rel=canonical in those pages making the problem.
I believe that this solution would need some coding creativity, to create a code that detects the URL non desired and put the right URL in the rel=canonical tag.
More info about that last:
301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use? - Blog Moz.comHope its useful.
GR. -
Most likely it's a setting in WordPress that has been turned on or turned off. I'm not sure how you were redirecting your site from www.company.com to company.com, but that's typically done in the .htaccess file on the site.
What you'll need to do is verify that it's still happening first. Use a server header check tool to see if company.com is redirecting to www.company.com (or vice versa).
There are several ways to set up these redirects, and you'll have to figure out how you were doing it previously. If you were using a plugin, it could be that the plugin was removed or deactivated (or updated). It could also be in the site's theme, some themes allow you to set your "preferred version" of your domain.
Lastly, I would go into Google Search Console and make sure you have set your preferred domain there (www or non-www) so Google knows which version to use. If you have it set there, there's a chance that your site's rankings may not be affected.
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
-
Open Site Explorer - Top Pages that don't exist / result of a hack(?)
Hi all, Last year, a website I monitor, got hacked, or infected with malware, I’m not sure which. The result that I got to see is 100’s of ‘not found’ entries in Google Search Console / Crawl Errors for non-existent pages relating to / variations of ‘Canada Goose’. And also, there's a couple of such links showing up in SERPs. Here’s an example of the page URLs: ourdomain.com/canadagoose.php ourdomain.com/replicacanadagoose.php I looked for advice on the webmaster forums, and was recommended to just keep marking them as ‘fixed’ in the console. Sooner or later they’ll disappear. Still, a year after, they appear. I’ve just signed up for a Moz trail and, in Open Site Explorer->Top Pages, the top 2-5 pages are relating to these non-existent pages: URLs that are the result of this ‘canada goose’ spam attack. The non-existent pages each have around 10 Linking Root Domains, with around 50 Inbound Links. My question is: Is there a more direct action I should take here? For example, informing Google of the offending domains with these backlinks. Any thoughts appreciated! Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macthing1 -
Duplicate/ <title>element too long issues</title>
I have a "duplicate <title>"/"<title> element too long" issue with thousands of pages. In the future I would like to automate these in a way that keeps them from being duplicated AND too long. The solution I came up with was to standardize these monthly posts with a similar, shorter, <title>, but then differentiate by adding the month and the year of the post at the end of each <title>. Hundreds of these come out every week, so it is hard to sit there and come up with a unique <title> every time. With this solution the <title> tags would undoubtedly be short enough, however my primary concern is, would simply adding the month and year at the end of each <title> be enough for Google/Moz to decide it is not a duplicate? How much variation is enough for it not to be deemed a duplicate <title>? </p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Articles marked with "This site may be hacked," but I have no security issues in the search console. What do I do?
There are a number of blog articles on my site that have started receiving the "This site may be hacked" warning in the SERP. I went hunting for security issues in the Search Console, but it indicated that my site is clean. In fact, the average position of some of the articles has increased over the last few weeks while the warning has been in place. The problem sounds very similar to this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/wmG4vEcr_l0 but that thread hasn't been touched since February. I'm fearful that the Google Form is no longer monitored. What other steps should I take? One query where I see the warning is "Brand Saturation" and this is the page that has the warning: http://brolik.com/blog/should-you-strive-for-brand-saturation-in-your-marketing-plan/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liggins0 -
Site appears with ".com" but not without it
Hi, When I search for my site www.docslinc.com as "docslinc.com" the results on the SERPS have the home page and the site map but not the other indexed pages. The other issue occurs when I search for the company name alone "docslinc", the homepage does not show up at all, and some of the other pages show up. I have looked all over the place and cannot find an answer. I have checked the onsite optimization and it all seems to be correct. Any suggestions would be amazing. Thanks, zulumanf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zulumanf0 -
How should I react to my site being "attacked" by bad links?
Hello, We have never bought links or done manipulative linbuilding. Meanwhile, someone has recently (15th of March) pointed at the top 5 websites on my main keyword with lots of bad quality links. So far it has not affected my rankings at all. Actually, I think it will not affect them because I think it was not a massive enough attack. The particular page that has been attacked had about 100 root domains pointing it and now it went up to something like 400. All those were in one day. All of those links use the same anchor text: the keyword we're ranking for. With those extra 300 root domains pointing at us, we went from 600 rootdomain to 900 pointing at our domain as a whole. The page that was targetted by the attack is not the homepage. What I wanted to do was to basically do nothing since I think it won't affect our rankings in any ways but I wanted you guys' opinion. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points in the last week?
My domain authority went from 51 to 49 in the last week. I haven't done any shady link building or really changed anything on the site. It is an ecommerce site so there is new product always added and we also have a full content magazine, so new content is added every monday and tuesday. The only thing that has happened is a press release went out on PRweb about a collaboration we've done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elubes0 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0