Duplicate content
-
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are:
www.domainname/directory-name/
www.domainname/directory-name/index.php
All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page.
Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
Here's some code from an htaccess file I've used before that solves the issue you've got with index.php at the end of all your urls:
#remove /index.php and ensure admin works okay
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
notice the line that contains ^/administrator , in Joomla, admin login is usuall on http://site.com/administrator/index.php
so, removing the index.php from the admin url would prevent any access to the admin screens! If your cms has a similar url, be sure to replace 'administrator' with the relevant url.
-
Hi Ade,
Thanks for all your help.
I will post a new question on the Q&A Forum regarding the .htaccess rule.
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
That one is a bit beyond me I'm afraid and I am not familiar with WebEdition at all.
With most CMS there are normally either built-in or add-on extensions to help with re-writing your urls but you need to be really careful that you don't end up with a completely new set of urls that don't match either of your originals.
A .htaccess rewrite rule may be your best option but I don't know what the coding for it would be.
-
We are using a CMS, its called WebEdition, is there a technical question i should ask them in what i need to do?
Kind Regards
-
Ahhhh. No definitely not practical, I thought that it was just the one url.
Are you using a content management system for your site such as Joomla?
-
Do you think that's practical to do that?
As i will need to do a 301 on literally every page if i don't want to show the /index.php
Is this what seomoz.org website does? for example:
-
In that case you can just add a 301 redirect in to your .htaccess file below the code you added earlier.
redirect 301 /football-teams/index.php http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
-
Hi Ade,
Yes, i tested http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams//index.php however it did not resolve to http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
Any ideas?
-
Hi Gary.
Have you tried visiting the url http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php to see if it now resolves to http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ ?
If it does then the issue is fixed, the next time SEOMoz crawls your site the error will dissapear.
Cheers.
Ade.
-
Hi Ade,
Thanks for the speedy reply.
I have now implemented this and works fantastic on the http://www.mydomain.com/
Thank you very much.
There is another issue however, i hope i can make sense here, here goes:
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's
http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/
http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php
I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean.
What would be best practice to fix this issue?
Kind Regards
-
Hey Gary.
Here's the solution that I use.
All my sites are hosted on a linux server so this won't be relevant if your site is hosted on a windows server.
1. create/modify your .htaccess file in your site's root directory.
2. Add the following code to the top of the file:-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]This will ensure that any requests sent to http://yourdomain.com are redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com and that the index.php part of the url is removed.
If you need more help on creating or modifying your .htaccess file then you can find more info here - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html
All the best.
Ade.
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
-
Canonical Tags for Legacy Duplicate Content
I've got a lot of duplicate pages, especially products, and some are new but most have been like this for a long time; up to several years. Does it makes sense to use a canonical tag pointing to one master page for each product. Each page is slightly different with a different feature and includes maybe a sentence or two that is unique but everything else is the same.
Technical SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
How can something be duplicate content of itself?
Just got the new crawl report, and I have a recurring issue that comes back around every month or so, which is that a bunch of pages are reported as duplicate content for themselves. Literally the same URL: http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is reporting that http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is both a duplicate title, and duplicate content. Well, I would hope so! It's the same URL! Is this a crawl error? Is it a site error? Has anyone seen this before? Do I need to give more information? P.S. awesomewidgetworld is not the actual site name.
Technical SEO | | BetAmerica0 -
Multiple URLs in CMS - duplicate content issue?
So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco. Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages). However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure. However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page. Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas. I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success. How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content? Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0