Simple duplicate content query
-
Hello Community,
One of my clients runs a job board website. They are having some new framework installed which will lead to them having to delete all their jobs and re-add them. The same jobs will be re-posted but with a different reference number which in turn with change each URL. I believe this will cause significant duplicate content issues, I just thought I would get a second opinion on best practice for approaching a situation like this.
Would a possible solution be to delete jobs gradually and 301 re-direct old URLs to new URLs?
Many thanks in advance,
Adam
-
If the only change is to the URL (and job reference) and the content is otherwise the same, you'd definitely want to create 301s for these - this is exactly what 301s are for, after all. The 301s should, now, pass on 100percent of the pagerank. There are caveats (PR is not the only ranking signal), see here: <a>https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo</a>
Also, think of the user experience, If I've bookmarked a job I'd expect to click the link and find it.
A thought: If the new system could append the job number with a fixed value, creating a pattern match redirect rule could make easy work of this for them.
Then, with your 301s in place (and confirmed to be in good order - you can run a crawl test: <a>https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test</a>, you can remove your old listings.
Sorry for the multiple revisions of this answer, Adam; I was in the bath when I started writing it!
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
-
Duplicate content or an update ???
Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff. Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals. Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword: “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ?? Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???
Technical SEO | | KimX0 -
Duplicate Tag Content Mystery
Hello Moz Communtiy! i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like: http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/ http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/ Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this? Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one? If you have any video basis on it, i will recommend.
Technical SEO | | navneetkumar7860 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050