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?
-
Thank you!
-
They are different ways of doing practically the same thing. In your .htaccess you would set up the /index.html to be 301 redirected to yourappliancerepairla.com. Which will redirect any user that lands on /index.html to yourappliancerepairla.com.
The canonical tag doesn't redirect the user to the homepage, but it tells google or any other search engine that the "original" content is yourappliancerepairla.com rather than /index.html or /home.html or www.yourappliancerepairla.com and so on.
I would give the edge to canonical tags, but 301 redirects in the .htaccess file do have their use.
Looking at your site (viewing the page source) your home nav link is pointing to /index.html you can change that to http://yourappliancerepairla.com or simply " / " that change might actually fix your issue... but I would still put a canonical tag in the header of index.html for defensive purposes. Also consider placing a canonical for all your pages as a defensive mechanism to duplicate content.
It's considered a duplicate because index.html does exist, index.html is the physical file of the homepage where you change code. All of these pages are possibilities your homepage (there are more):
http://yourappliancerepairla.com
http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com
https://yourappliancerepairla.com
https://yourappliancerepairla.com
http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html
http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html
There are more possibilities. That is why the canonical tag is important here. Also consider google search console and setting up properties for http non www, http www, https non www, and https www all pointing to the preferred version of your site which would be the http non www.
-
Is this better than updating my .htaccess file? Could you explain me please why the second one, with DA of 1 and that doesn't even exist (you cannot access it) is considered to be a duplicate?
http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19)
http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1)
Thank you!
-
On the index.html page, in your section place a canonical tag pointing to http://yourappliancerepairla.com
like this:
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
-
Best way to fix duplicate content issues
Another question for the Moz Community. One of my clients has 4.5k duplicate content issues. For example: http://www.example.co.uk/blog and http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?route=blog/blog/listblog&year=2017. Most of the issues are coming from product pages. My initial thoughts are to set up 301 redirects in the first instance and if the issue persists, add canonical tags. Is this the best way of tackling this issue?
Technical SEO | | Laura-EMC0 -
Partial duplicate content (reviews) on product pages - is this ok?
Hello, we recently received some really good reviews about a range of products we sell (there are normally 8 products in a range). Due to the industry we are in it made no sense to try and get reviews on each individual product within the range as they differ only ever so slightly. So my question is we want to add these reviews to each of the 8 products that lie within each range, but by adding them it would mean that each page has around 600 words of unique product description followed by approx 600 words of reviews that are the same on each of the products within that range. Is this ok? my only other option would be to screenshot the reviews and upload them as images below each product description. If anyone could offer advice here that would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | livs20130 -
Is this duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content?
Hello, My question is: Is it duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content? For example, here is the original page: http://www.saugstrup.org/en-ny-content-marketing-case-infografik/. But that same content can be found here: http://www.kommunikationsforum.dk/anders-saugstrup/blog/en-ny-content-marketing-case-til-dig, but there is a link back to the original content. Is it still duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JoLindahl912 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
SEO MOZ report showing duplicate content pages with without ending /
Hello the SEOMOZ report is showing me I have a lot of duplicate content and then proceeds listing almost every page on my site as showing with a URL with an ending "/" and without. I checked my sitemap and only one version is there, the one with "/". I have a Wordpress site. Any recommendations ? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | dpaq20110 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0