Dearest SEO Friends,
I'm working on a site that has over 2,400 instances of duplicate content (yikes!).
I'm hoping somebody could offer some excel tips or tricks to managing my SEOMoz crawl diagnostics summary data file in a meaningful way, because right now this spreadsheet is not really helpful. Here's a hypothetical situation to describe why:
Say we had three columns of duplicate content. The data is displayed thusly:
|
Column A
|
Column B
|
Column C
URL A
|
URL B
|
URL C
|
In a perfect world, this is easy to understand. I want URL A to be the canonical. But unfortunately, the way my spreadsheet is populated, this ends up happening:
|
Column A
|
Column B
|
Column C
URL A
|
URL B
|
URL C
URL B
|
URL A
|
URL C
URL C
|
URL A
|
URL B
|
Essentially all of these URLs would end up being called a canonical, thus rendering the effect of the tag ineffective. On a site with small errors, this has never been a problem, because I can just spot check my steps. But the site I'm working on has thousands of instances, making it really hard to identify or even scale these patterns accurately.
This is particularly problematic as some of these URLs are identified as duplicates 50+ times! So my spreadsheet has well over 100K cells!!! Madness!!! Obviously, I can't go through manually. It would take me years to ensure the accuracy, and I'm assuming that's not really a scalable goal.
Here's what I would love, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Does anyone know of a formulaic way that Excel could identify row matches and think - "oh! these are all the same rows of data, just mismatched. I'll kill off duplicate rows, so only one truly unique row of data exists for this particular set" ? Or some other work around that could help me with my duplicate content madness?
Much appreciated, you Excel Gurus you!
