Duplicate Content?
-
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.)
But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it?
Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
-
Cool. No worries
StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.
If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect
You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Yes, on Google webmaster...sorry. And it's apache.
thank u!
-
Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.
That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.
Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!
Mike
-
HI Mike,
Thank you. To change all the titles is a huge task, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think I'll put them in a folder and mark the page link to that folder with a nofollow. As to the canoncalization of the two names, I have marked one of them as the top one in Google Analytics. But I have a much greater problem than that. I have several domain names that are on the same server and that all point to the one domain (same files and folders). I have been attempting to get my server techs to do a 301 redirect so that only http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com displays in a browser. However, every time they attempt to do it, part or all of my site stops working correctly.
-
You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.
I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com
The issue with this, that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.
As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.
Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results. The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.
If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.
That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.
The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!
I hope that helps.
Mike
-
thank u. I'm gonna do that!
-
Hi Mike,
That was fast. I copied some of the report from Seomoz "Crawled Diagnostics." Some do have the same titles, which was an edition after many years. The early newsletters I didn't even title, so they have a "default title" of the url.
I happened on SEOmoz, because I am trying to figure out why after so many years of having been on the first or second page of Google search results, we are lucky to show up on page 10 or deeper, if at all.
So I'm trying out SEOmoz to see if this will help us get back on top!
|
The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr10.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr08.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr09.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Feb06.html
-
Hi Sarah,
If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.
What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?
Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.
The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.
If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.
... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.
Hope this helps,
Mike
-
The best way to go is to put all your newsletters in on folder and and disallow the folder in your robot.txt.
rel nofollow & robot.txt are only read by google bot, your visitors won't be affected and will be able to navigate & search the archives without 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
-
How to deal with 80 websites and duplicated content
Consider the following: A client of ours has a Job boards website. They then have 80 domains all in different job sectors. They pull in the jobs based on the sectors they were tagged in on the back end. Everything is identical across these websites apart from the brand name and some content. whats the best way to deal with this?
Technical SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
Duplicate content or titles
Hello , I am working on a site, I am facing the duplicate title and content errors,
Technical SEO | | KLLC
there are following kind of errors : 1- A link with www and without www having same content. actually its a apartment management site, so it has different bedrooms apartments and booking pages , 2- my second issue is related to booking and details pages of bedrooms, because I am using 1 file for all booking and 1 file for all details page. these are the main errors which i am facing ,
can anyone give me suggestions regarding these issues ? Thnaks,0 -
Advice on Duplicate Page Content
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them. For example - http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
Technical SEO | | jsmoz
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs We have many such pages. Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?0 -
Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Avoiding duplicate content/same pages
hi I have been checking through all the Q and A but i i'm still not sure how you get http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html to be just http://www.domain.co.uk/? Do you add canonical to the index page to point to the page you prefer and then add a 301 redirect? thanks
Technical SEO | | challen0