Fix Duplicate Content Before Migration?
-
My client has 2 Wordpress sites (A and B).
Each site is 20 pages, with similar site structures, and 12 of the pages on A having nearly 100% duplicate content with their counterpart on B. I am not sure to what extent A and/or B is being penalized for this.
In 2 weeks (July 1) the client will execute a rebrand, renaming the business, launching C, and taking down A and B. Individual pages on A and B will be 301 redirected to their counterpart on C.
C will have a similar site structure to A and B. I expect the content will be freshened a bit, but may initially be very similar to the content on A and B.
I have 3 questions:
-
Given that only 2 weeks remain before the switchover - is there any purpose in resolving the duplicate content between A and B prior to taking them down?
-
Will 301 redirects from penalized pages on A or B actually hurt the ranking of the destination page on C?
-
If a page on C has the same content as its predecessor on A or B, could it be penalized for that, even though the page on A or B has since been taken down and replaced with a 301 redirect?
-
-
I've had similar questions regarding duplicate content. Thanks for the helpful answer and link!
-
-
Definitely not.
-
Hard to say for sure but I really doubt it. You can't actually get penalised for duplicate content so if anything I'd say it's a positive signal that 2 duplicate sets have been consolidated.
-
No. Theoretically there may be a window there where the new site is crawled before Google has noticed that the old one is no longer live (rankings are done based on their cached version, not the live site so if they still have the old site in cache, to Google it's still considered live) but that's both temporary and unlikely to have any measurable impact.
I'm working through a similar situation for a client at the moment where I'm waiting on their dev team to finish up the new site and I have a bunch of rubbish pages I want to do away with. The most efficient way to deal with both situations given they're just a couple of weeks away is to wait for the new site.
Hope that helps!
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
After Server Migration - Crawling Gets slow and Dynamic Pages wherein Content changes are not getting Updated
Hello, I have just performed doing server migration 2 days back All's well with traffic moved to new servers But somehow - it seems that w.r.t previous host that on submitting a new article - it was getting indexed in minutes. Now even after submitting page for indexing - its taking bit of time in coming to Search Engines and some pages wherein content is daily updated - despite submitting for indexing - changes are not getting reflected Site name is - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Have checked in robots, meta tags, url structure - all remains well intact. No unknown errors reports through Google webmaster Could someone advise - is it normal - due to name server and ip address change and expect to correct it automatically or am i missing something Kindly advise in . Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Duplicate content issue for franchising business
Hi All We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details. This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts. The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee. I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this. Kind regards Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterpete0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110