Dulpicate Content being reported
-
Hi
I have a new client whose first MA crawl report is showing lots of duplicate content.
The main batch of these are all the HP url with an 'attachment' part at the end such as:
www.domain.com/?attachment_id=4176
As far as i can tell its some sort of slide show just showing a different image in the main frame of each page, with no other content. Each one does have a unique meta title & H1 though.
Whats the best thing to do here ?
-
Not a problem and leave as is
-
Use the paremeter handling tool in GWT
-
Canonicalise, referencing the HP
or other solution ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
-
Hi Dan,
Actually it looks like ctrl L will do it (you are creating an excel table). You usually need to erase the first few rows from the export so you have the column header in row 1 and then select all and create the table checking the 'my table has headers' so that you can then filter using the headers
-
Sorry Lynn but what is the 'windows' bit in control-windows-L since cant see on my keyboard, can it have a different icon/symbol etc?
-
Great stuff thanks Lynn !! Ill tell their dev to do that
many many thanks
All Best
Dan
-
cool cheers Don
-
Hi Dan,
The robots must be getting the urls from somewhere so it is worth finding out where. If you download the moz report in csv and open in excel you can control-windows-L to get a filterable list. If you filter for duplicates and find these urls on the left then on the far right it should reference where they are being linked from. I suspect you will find pages in the site that have these images in them and are linking to the attachment_id urls (often it is from gallery pages).
Once you have found the pages, then try applying the yoast redirects and see if they work as expected (ie redirect the attachment_id links to the relevant gallery page for example). Ideally you would get rid of the links completely from the code - this will probably need a bit of dev work on the template but should be pretty straightforward since you are likely just removing the A tag from around the images.
-
Gotcha, definitely don't want to nix pages then. I would imagine Lynn's response is more appropriate then, it is likely that he is using a plugin that has been updated to better SEO practices that he hasn't yet updated.
-
Many thanks Don
ill ask client but dont think so (doubt any links pointing to them) but due to varying kw rich meta titles and h1's think client may have implemented this for some seo reason (hes very seo savvy but bit old school) prob not aware needs more content on page beyond a pic & some meta & an h1.
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
All Best
Dan
-
Thanks Lyn
Yes it is wp i think
If i click on the image it loads page with image (another duplicate) in the series next
I'm not sure what the normal page is since can only find these via the cralw reports, they dont seem to be linked to in any site nav etc
Does that sound to you then like best solution is via Yoast redirects etc ?
On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
If these pages have no SEO value then you can just stop them from being crawled, thus preventing any duplicate content penalties. If you see some backlinks (SEO value) to any of these then I would use Canonical.
robots.txt
User-agent:: *
Disallow: /*attachment_id
Hope it helps,
Don
-
Hi Dan,
Is the site running wordpress? If so it sounds like maybe a badly coded template which is showing links somewhere in the code to the attachments (if you click on the image in its normal page does it take you to the duplicate url you mention?). It would be best to find out where the linking is happening and correct it so the links are removed if at all possible. The Yoast plugin also has a setting where you can redirect attachment ids to their related post (its in the permalinks settings of the yoast plugin) - that might help solve the problem.
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
-
Unsolved Duplicate Content
We have multiple collections being flagged as duplicate content - but I can't find where these duplications are coming from? The duplicate content has no introductory text, and no meta description. Please see examples:- This is the correct collection page:-
Technical SEO | | Caroline_Ardmoor
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/deerhunter This is the incorrect collection page:-
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/vendors How do I stop this incorrect page from showing?0 -
Duplicate Content - Different URLs and Content on each
Seeing a lot of duplicate content instances of seemingly unrelated pages. For instance, http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-bluetooth-speakers.html?from=topnav3 is being tracked as a duplicate of http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-planners-diaries.html?resultsperpg=viewall. Does anyone else see this issue? Is there a solution anyone is aware of?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Dynamic content in meta tag
Hi There, A quick query, If few stats digits or numbers are taken in Meta description and they change daily that's why meta description changed regularly. example : current stats: 2859594 hosted sites, 99.57% uptime last week, 59.52% positive social media user sentiment, and 43 user reviews. changes in digits effect SEO Ranking? Rajiv
Technical SEO | | gamesecure0 -
Adding content into an iframe
I want to buy an app/program that will help me create unique content but the content will be inserted to the page via an iframe. I have heard that iframes are problematic. I know that there will not be a lot of indexable content from this but I think that it will make people want to link to me. I would like to hear from someone's experience if I should go ahead or not.
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Techniques for diagnosing duplicate content
Buonjourno from Wetherby UK 🙂 Diagnosing duplicate content is a classic SEO skill but I'm curious to know what techniques other people use. Personally i use webmaster tools as illustrated here: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/webmaster-tools-duplicate.jpg but what other techniques are effective? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
David0 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
How critical is Duplicate content warnings?
Hi, So I have created my first campaign here and I have to say the tools, user interface and the on-page optimization, everything is useful and I am happy with SEOMOZ. However, the crawl report returned thousands of errors and most of them are duplicate content warnings. As we use Drupal as our CMS, the duplicate content is caused by Drupal's pagination problems. Let's say there is a page called "/top5list" , the crawler decided /top5list?page=1" to be duplicate of "/top5list". There is no real solution for pagination problems in Drupal (as far as I know). I don't have any warnings in Google's webmaster tools regarding this and my sitemap I submitted to Google doesn't include those problematic deep pages. (that are detected as duplicate content by SEOMOZ crawler) So my question is, should I be worried about the thousands of error messages in crawler diagnostics? any ideas appreciated
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001