Duplicate content and 404 errors
-
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of.
For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index?
also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do
-
Ali,
If you are on WordPress you can try some of these. First, set up the free Yoast SEO plugin if you have not already.
I have been working on this exact issue. The way Tags are set up (on the client site) we are getting duplicate pages. I am trying a couple of things:
-
In Yoast XML Sitemaps > Taxonomies you can set "Tags" to "Not in Sitemap". Removing them from the XML Sitemap will at least lessen the frequency that Google accesses Taged pages.
-
In Yoast Titles & Meta > Taxonomies you can select Index or Noindex for your Tags.
Following the Tag idea, you might get a 404 if a Tag is changed or deleted. It's hard to diagnose 404s without seeing them. Consider a custom 404 error page, if you have not already. That will at least improve the user experience. With htaccess you set different redirects and custome 404 pages depending on the site section.
Tags in WP don't seem to add much benefit, and probably cause more problems (like dupe content). Even if you are diligent with Tag consisitency, most blogs end up with nearly duplicate Tags.
There are many Moz posts on the topic of duplicate content in WP specific to Tags that might further illuminate your question.
Did you change anything universally, like switch to https? Missed redirects can cause a 404.
The WP Broken Links in Tools will direct you straight to the 404 pages.
Here are some more tips for dealing with 404 in WP:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/6-best-free-404-plugins-for-wordpress/The WP plugin "Redirection" is well regarded, but use caution with lots of ecomm url variables.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Hi Ali,
Are you on WordPress?
Jason
-
Hi Ali,
Please check the title of your pages, if they are same then those links would be counted as duplicates. Also, check how many duplicates are being reported in google webmaster, these are also good indicators for duplicate pages.
This link  should help as well
http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
& this is a link to a 301 redirect generator
http://www.htaccessredirect.com
Remember to also use a
Rel=Canonical put this tag in the correct page you want to show people.Then do a 301 redirect on the pages that are duplicates and point them on ONLY right one
As for 404, they will need to be reviewed and handled with 301 to map them to actual URL.
I hope this helps, please feel free to respond if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
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
-
To what extent is content considered unique or duplicate?
I work primarily on classifieds websites and an issue I consistently come across are two or more URLs which have the exact same ad count, due to site structure and the way everything is categorized. An example of such would be with these two pages: https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/motorboats/princess https://www.boatshop24.co.uk/boats-for-sale/princess/power These two have the exact same number of ads- would search engines mark these as duplicate content? Both have different meta descriptions, title tags etc. but essentially the MC is exactly the same. If they are, what would be the best course to remedy the problem? I'm skeptical about using canonical tags as I generally use them for exact duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received  Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
404 from a 404 that 301s
I must be missing something or skipping a step or lacking proper levels of caffeine. Under my High Priority warnings I have a handful of 404s which are like that on purpose but I'm not sure how Moz is finding them. When I check the referrer info, the 404 is being linked to from a different 404 which is now a 301 (due to craziness of our system and what was easiest for the coders to fix a different problem ages ago). Basically, if a user decides to type in a non-existent model number into the URL there is a specific 404 that comes up. While the 404 error is "site.com/product/?model=abc123" the referrer is "site.com/product?model=abc123" (or more simply, one slash is missing). I can't see how Moz is finding the referrer so I can't figure out how to make Moz stop crawling it. I actually have the same problem in Google WMT for the same group of 404s. What am I just not seeing that will fix this?
Technical SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Many Errors on E-commerce website mainly Duplicate Content - Advice needed please!
Hi Mozzers, I would need some advice on how to tackle one of my client’s websites. We have just started doing SEO for them and after moz crawled the e-commerce it has detected: 36 329 Errors – 37496 warnings and 2589 Notices all going up! Most of the errors are due to duplicate titles and page content but I cannot identify where the duplicate pages come from, these are the links moz detected of the Duplicate pages (unfortunately I cannot add the website for confidentiality reasons) : • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_2=&products_per_00&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&page=2 With these URLs it is quite hard to identify which pages need to be canonicalize. And this is jsut an example out of thousands on this website. If anyone would have any advice on how to fix this and how to tackle 37496 errors on a website like this  that would be great. Thank you for your time, Lyam
Technical SEO | | AlphaDigital0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
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