Web designer doesn't see duplicate pages or issues??? Help!
-
I have a website that has duplicate pages, and I want to fix them. I told my web guy and his response was:
"we do not see any issues on our end. It is not hurting any ranking in the 3 major searches. We have no duplicate pages"
Here's the site http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/
Here's the home page again http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php
Here's what MOZ say: Please see attached image.
I'm not sure what to tell him, as i'm not a web person, but MOZ is telling me we have issues on the site and I feel like they should be fixed??
-
Best of luck, feel free to send me an email (or message on here) if you need me to go any further into detail.
-
I'm now well armed to go back to him and ask again for him to make these changes.
Hopefully he'll listen to me this time! Though I'm now thinking I need a new guy...
Thanks Thomas!
-
Thank you Laura, you've given me a clearer understanding of what I need to say to him. I do think I need a new guy though..
-
Your web developer is wrong. You do have multiple version of the homepage
You have the following:
http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php
http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/
http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php
http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/
I would first of all get your web developer to do a http:// to http://www. redirect across your whole site, so whenever any user lands on your site they atleast get put onto the same version.
As for with/without index.php you are getting these duplicates, I would ask the web developer to remove any references to index.php and just refer specifically to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ whilst also setting a canonical within the index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/
If your developer tries to fight this I would look for a new developer.
Just had a quick look through the site, your developer looks to be being lazy. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/I6khUBrH under serve scaled images, they haven't bothered to resize it and that's making your website load slower.
http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/images/img0018.png is just a lazy way of naming images.
-
Yes, this is a duplicate problem when it comes to SEO. This is an issue for two reasons:
1. Search engines see these as two different URLs even though they point to the same page. They probably understand that it's the same page but not necessarily. The correct way to handle this would be to 301-redirect http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/. (If your designer doesn't know how to do this, you need a new web designer.)
2. This is also a problem because any backlinks may be split between the two URLs even though they are the same page. This will be fixed by the 301-redirect as well.
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
-
Building a new page: What on-page SEO would you build in?
Hi all, Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult. I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest? Cheers in advance, Rhys
On-Page Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
Why my keyword rank fell down while I didn't do anything wrong?
Hi! I just got ranking results for the past week, and I am a little bit confused about what I saw. Two weeks ago, I optimized one of my website's page for the keyword "viking appliance repair in Los Angeles" (was #43 before), and one week later I found it on the second page of Google (ranked #21). I continued working on other pages thinking that all I need to do for "viking appliance repair in Los Angeles" to get it ranked even higher is to gain high quality inbound links. But for some reason updated ranking results I got today show this keyword fell down and now ranked #51. Could you please tell me why that might happened? What affected this keyword performance while I didn't do anything with it in between that much?
On-Page Optimization | | kirupa0 -
Hiding body copy with a 'read more' drop down option
Hi I just want to confirm how potentially damaging using java script to hide lots of on page body copy with a 'read more' button is ? As per other moz Q&A threads i was told that best not to use Javascript to do this & instead "if you accomplish this with CSS and collapsible/expandable <DIV> tags it's totally fine" so thats what i advised my clients dev. However i recently noticed a big drop in rankings aprox 1 weeks after dev changing the body copy format (hiding alot of it behind a 'read more' button) so i asked them to confirm how they did implement it and they said: "done in javascript but on page load the text is defaulting to show" (which is contrary to my instructions) So how likely is it that this is causing problems ? since coincides with ranking drop OR if text is defaulting to show it should be ok/not cause probs ? And should i request that they redo as originally instructed (css & collapsible divs) asap ? All Best Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to solve duplicate content issue???
I have 5 websites with different domain names, every website have same content, same pages, same website design. Kindly let me know how to solve this issue.
On-Page Optimization | | ross254sidney0 -
Duplicate Home Page
Hi, I have a question around best practise on duplicate home pages. The /index.aspx page is showing up as a top referrer in my analytics. I have the rel=canonical tag implemented for the www.mysite.com on both pages. Do I need to 301 the /index.aspx to the mysite.com? I have a lot of links pointing to the /index.aspx (half of those are coming from the mysite.com). www.mysite.com/index.aspx www.mysite.com Many thanks Jon
On-Page Optimization | | JonRaubenheimer0 -
Meta Data definition for multiple pages. Potential duplicate content risk?
Hi all, One of our clients needs to redefine their meta title and description tags. They publish very similar information almost every day, so the structure they propose is the following: Structure 1: Type of Analysis + periodicity + data + brand name Examples 1: Monthly Market Analysis, 1/5/2012 - Brand Name Weekly Technical Analysis, 7/5/2012 - Brand Name Structure 2: Company Name + investment recommendation + periodicity Example 2: Iberdrola + investment recommendation (this text doesn't vary) + 2T12 (wich means 2012, 2nd trimestrer) Regarding meta description they want to follow a similar approach, replicating every time the same info with a slight variation for each publication. I'm afraid this may cause a duplicate content problem because of the resemblance of every "Market Analysis" done or every "Investment recommendation" done in the future. My initial suggestion for them is to define specific and unique meta data for each page, but this is not possible for them given the time it takes to do it for every page. Finally, I ask them to specify the data in each meta title of content published, in order to add something different each time and avoid duplicate content penalty. Will this be enough to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance for your help folks! Alex
On-Page Optimization | | elisainteractive0 -
Why does my on-page report card say my page title is 403 forbidden when its not?
I'm trying to get on top of my on page stuff and I'm going through the SEO Moz on-page report cards and it says I'm scoring a fail on certain elements within the 'critical' and 'high importance' factors as my page title is '403 forbidden' but when I go on to my site, my sites CMS it's not '403 forbidden' it's the text I entered?
On-Page Optimization | | jamesj35mm0 -
Page title getting cut off in SERPS even though it's under 70 characters?
I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS. It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name. Does a "-" have anything to do with it? Does that translate to an elipsis? Format: keywords - website/brand.com Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelWeisbaum0