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
-
Thanks Don.
The links are external. We do have a general 404 page, but for whatever reason, when he built this site, the developer guided those specific 404s to that news page.
Thanks again.
-
The alternative he suggested was to delete the page. Before I removed a page I would canonical it.You can always undo the Canonical once content becomes available.
-
I would only use the Canonical tag if you don't want these pages to rank for anything in particular. When you set the authoritative page, you are eliminating the ranking potential of the non authoritative pages. Is it possible to get user generated content for these pages? Like reviews?
-
Hi George,
To the first issue. Have you considered using a REL=CANONICAL tag on this pages with thin to no content (point to them to the parent category). Barring that option you could also just put a NOINDEX / NOFOLLOW. No sense in removing the page just in case it has a few links out there.
For the 404 page, the main reason I would suspect Moz seeing this as duplicate content would be because of parameters on it. It would make more sense to have a universal 404 Page and let the server handle the error for you and redirect where appropriate. Moz site.. www.thisSite.com/catalog/ImGoingNoWhere.php
404 Page are usually pretty simple to setup content wise. Your second goal would be to remove all links on your site that would return a 404.
-
Hi there,
If you have a lot of HTML coding on pages, with no content, your HTML coding is what is triggering the duplicate content. Because you have no content, the HTML is all the bots see and if it is really similar, there is nothing to tell them that there is anything unique on the pages.
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 and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Javascript tabbed navigation and duplicate content
I'm working on a site that has four primary navigation links and under each is a tabbed navigation system for second tier items. The primary link page loads content for all tabs which are javascript controlled. Users will click the primary navigation item "Our Difference" (http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference) and have several options with each tabs content in separate sections. Each second tier tab is also available via sitemap/direct link (ie http://www.holidaytreefarm.com/content.cfm/Our-Difference/Tree-Logistics) without the js navigation so the content on this page is specific to the tab, not all tabs. In this scenario, will there be duplicate content issues? And, what is the best way to remedy this? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
Duplicate homepage content across multiple websites
Hi, I work for a company that runs 30+ membership based websites on separate domains and across multiple markets. The homepage for each site contains a section of content that highlights the site benefits and features. While each website serves a different market/niche, this section of content is essentially the same as each website offers the same benefits and features. What is the best way to avoid duplicate content issues while still being able to show the same section of content across 30+ sites? This particular section of content isn't valuable from an SEO perspective, but the rest of the content on that page is. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Is Noindex Enough To Solve My Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello SEO Gurus! I have a client who runs 7 web properties. 6 of them are satellite websites, and 7th is his company's main website. For a long while, my company has, among other things, blogged on a hosted blog at www.hismainwebsite.com/blog, and when we were optimizing for one of the other satellite websites, we would simply link to it in the article. Now, however, the client has gone ahead and set up separate blogs on every one of the satellite websites as well, and he has a nifty plug-in set up on the main website's blog that pipes in articles that we write to their corresponding satellite blog as well. My concern is duplicate content. In a sense, this is like autoblogging -- the only thing that doesn't make it heinous is that the client is autoblogging himself. He thinks that it will be a great feature for giving users to his satellite websites some great fresh content to read -- which I agree, as I think the combination of publishing and e-commerce is a thing of the future -- but I really want to avoid the duplicate content issue and a possible SEO/SERP hit. I am thinking that a noindexing of each of the satellite websites' blog pages might suffice. But I'd like to hear from all of you if you think that even this may not be a foolproof solution. Thanks in advance! Kind Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Issues
Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc... My question is, how do you handle these issues? Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc? By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages? I hope this makes sense. Regards, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Question about duplicate content within my site
Hi. New here to SEOmoz and also somewhat new to SEO in general. A friend has asked me to help do some onsite SEO for their company's website. The company uses Drupal Content Management System. They have a couple product pages that contain a tabbed section for features, accessories, etc. When they built their tabs, they used a Drupal module called Quicktabs, by which each individual tab is created as a separate page and then pulled into the tabs from those pages. So, in essence, you now have instances of repeated content. 1) the page used to create the tab, and 2) the tab that displays on the product page. My question is, how should I handle the pages that were used to create the tabs? Should I make them NOINDEX? Thank you for your advice in advance.
Technical SEO | | aprilm-1890400