Please help....
-
Hi Guys!
Ok a bit of a funny one here which is causing a confusion between us and a web designer and I was wondering if anyone on here might be able to help.
Just a bit of back ground for you, the website has been built on Concrete 5 and when we tried to building a sitemap we found over 110,000 pages. When we spoke to the web designer they have told us that within Google webmaster tools, Google has only indexed 58. But.... (and this is where things get a little confusing, so bare with me.)
I thought that cant be right so into the Google search bar I put in site:www.sitename.co.uk and had 217 results appear. So google cant have just 58 pages indexed, right?
So after speaking to the designer he then posted on the Concrete 5 help forum, to try and help figure it out.
I have posted his exact forum post below that the web designer has asked:
I'm having some issues where a site we are working on seems to be making multiple pages going to the same page. An SEO specialist has run a report and found a number of duplicate pages created by C5.
We are concerned that this is going to dilute or worse penalise the way google sees the site.
http://www.sitename.co.uk/
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...Is there a way of stopping google from accessing these duplicate 'cID' pages and stop them being made? Also is there a way of getting rid of the ones that are there? We've done a number of sites in C5 and are beginning to get concerned about this...
So I guess my question is:
If I can access the same content via 4-5 different cID's is that classed as duplicate content?
Thanks in advance guys, and any help would greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks EGOL & Marie for being so helpful!
Anyone else have any experiences working with Concrete 5?
-
Yup...that's what I was thinking. Simply put a rel canonical on each of the pages with duplicates and this will tell Google which page is the real one. This'll solve the problem.
-
If I can access the same content via 4-5 different cID's is that classed as duplicate content?
Yes, that is duplicate content - and all of the extra pages are a linkjuice sink. You might be able to fix this with rel="canonical"
see Matt Cutts video here.. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
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
-
Country and Language tags-Running an SEO audit on a site that definitely has more than one language, but nothing is pulling up. I don't quite understand href lang or how to go about it. HELP HELP!
Ran an SEO audit and I don't really understand country and language tags. For example, sony.com definitely has more than one language, but how do I seo check href lang ? Do I inspect the page? etc?
Technical SEO | | Mindgruver0 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay
Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).
Technical SEO | | mattylac0 -
Help with Webmaster Tools "Not Followed" Errors
I have been doing a bunch of 301 redirects on my site to address 404 pages and in each case I check the redirect to make sure it works. I have also been using tools like Xenu to make sure that I'm not linking to 404 or 301 content from my site. However on Friday I started getting "Not Followed" errors in GWT. When I check the URL that they tell me provided the error it seems to redirect correctly. One example is this... http://www.mybinding.com/.sc/ms/dd/ee/48738/Astrobrights-Pulsar-Pink-10-x-13-65lb-Cover-50pk I tried a redirect tracer and it reports the redirect correctly. Fetch as googlebot returns the correct page. Fetch as bing bot in the new bing webmaster tools shows that it redirects to the correct page but there is a small note that says "Status: Redirection limit reached". I see this on all of the redirects that I check in the bing webmaster portal. Do I have something misconfigured. Can anyone give me a hint on how to troubleshoot this type of issue. Thanks, Jeff
Technical SEO | | mybinding10 -
Help needed please with 301 redirects in htaccess file.
In summary, we're currently having issues with our htaccess file. 301 redirects are going through to the new described URL but in addition the new URL is followed by a ? and the old URL. How can we get rid of the ? and previous URL so they don't appear as an ending. None of the examples we've found re this issue online appear to work. Can anyone please offer some advice? Can we use a RewriteRule to stop this happening? Here's a summary of the htaccess file REDIRECT CODE BEGINS HERE LONG LIST OF REDIRECTS, which appear to be set up perfectly fine. REDIRECT CODE ENDS DirectoryIndex index.php <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | petersommertravels
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|pdf|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.php0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Help with SEO
Hello, I am brand new to SEO and I'm learning on the go everyday. I am having issues with Google and getting any sort of ranking or analysis or even just traffic reports. I understand the site has never really been optimized so it might really not have any reports. So basically my real question is what helpful tricks or hints do you guys have that I can implement? Anything and everything helps. So far I have run the crawl diagnostics and I'm working on fixing the errors. Thanks fr your help.
Technical SEO | | Future130