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Hi Tom

Thanks for your reply and useful help. Your advice about the 301 tallies with what others have said about the matter.

With regard to your indexing question only the ranking url is being indexed.

Thanks again for your help.

Hi

I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text.

I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools.

The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this:

companyname.com/category/index.php

The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url:

companyname.com/category/

The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page.

My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page?

If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

That's great Mike, thanks for your help.

I'm pretty confident it's not a duplicate page now, although we do need to link to the correct page, simply from a user experience point of view.

Cheers.

Many thanks for your answer danrawk.

I think the # has been left from when the website was being developed and was used as a placeholder for where the intended url should go.

I'm not seeing any duplicate content issues in Webmaster Tools. Would this mean Google doesn't see this as two different urls?

If it does see two different urls, I guess we will have to use canonical tag.

Thanks

Hi

I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php

There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there.

Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines?

If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php

be transferred to

www.companyname.com/category.index.php#

and affect the ranking of the non # page?

I hope this makes sense!

Thanks

Hi Tom

That's a great help.

I just wanted to ensure there wasn't a simpler solution besides rewriting the content. I guess that is the easiest and will ensure canonical tag solution is implemented too.

Thanks.

Hi

I have a client whose site content has been scraped and used in numerous other sites. This is detrimental to ranking. One term we wish to rank for is nowhere.

My question is this: what's the quickest way to resolve a duplicate content issue when other sites have stolen your content?

I understand that maybe I should firstly contact these site owners and 'appeal to their better nature'. This will take time and they may not even comply.

I've also considered rewriting our content. Again this takes time.

Has anybody experienced this issue before? If so how did you come to a solution?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Chris

With over 4000 pages on your site I'm assuming you are using some kind of CMS? Either way I would recommend the use of the rel=canonical tag to counter this potential duplicate content issue.

It helps by a. proving to the search engine's you are already aware of this issue and b. clarify which of the duplicate pages they should prioritise and pass DA to.

SEOmoz have published a great post on the various options on how to implement the code which can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content.

The other option would be to use 301's. In my experience implementing 301's on a window's server (assuming this is the case as your url extension is .asp?) can be tricky. The management of hundred's of 301's can also become very cumbersome and complicated often resulting in infinite loop errors.

Hope that helps.

All the best

Alex

I came across this list http://www.seomoz.org/directories and was wondering what everybody's opinions are on using directories for link building.

Are they a  complete waste of time and money? Does anybody get positive results from doing directory submissions?

Cheers

Al