Duplicate META Description
-
Two of my urls point to the same site. For example: 123.com and OneTwoThree.com. Because the pages have two separate url's and the same content, my Google Webmaster Tools account is showing this as Duplicate Meta Descriptions. Is there a way around this?
-
It sounds like you have a duplicate content problem inclusive of a duplicate Meta description problem. If you can make the content unique on both domains you will have the ability to update the Meta description creating two unique pieces of content which puts you in a better position than you are in now.
-
You may want to read this page before you go down that path (talks about redirecting one directory to another): http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3205094.htm
I might use something like this in an .htaccess file on the domain that you want to send to the other domain:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
You can leave off the "%{REQUEST_URI}" part if you just want to send them to the home page of the new domain.
-
Hi Mike,
That's a good idea. I have never done a redirect for a different url. Below is an example of how I usually do a redirect for a sub-page. Would it still look like this:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/example1.html$ http://www.example2.com
-
Why don't you 301 redirect one of the sites to the other?
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
-
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
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 in product listing
We have "duplicate content" warning in our moz report which mostly revolve around our product listing (eCommerce site) where various filters return 0 results (and hence show the same content on the page). Do you think those need to be addressed, and if so how would you prevent product listing filters that appearing as duplicate content pages? should we use rel=canonical or actually change the content on the page?
Technical SEO | | erangalp0 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
Technical SEO | | gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0 -
API for testing duplicate content
Does anyone know a service or API or php lib to compare two (or more) pages and to return their similiarity (Level-3-Shingles). API would be greatly prefered.
Technical SEO | | Sebes0 -
Site description on Google has changed to a very outdated description
When I googled my top keyword today, my site on google showed a description of my site from YEARS ago. It is completely irrevelant and misleading to visitors. Why would this have happened and is there anything I can do about it? Thanks!!! Betsy
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0