Resurrecting a heavily duplicated Joomla website.
-
The site in question is stanwix.info.
I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo. It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz.
Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast.
As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly.
OR
do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project. I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time.
The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with.
Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.
-
Here are my suggestions
- While upgrading software is typically a good thing, it sounds like you're possibly going to break things by doing it (I would assume we're talking major version changes, not patch levels). I would make sure of what you're going to break before doing it. At least make a test copy somewhere and monkey with it there. NEVER "tinker" with your live site.
- There are scripts that can export Joomla sites. If you do switch software, be meticulous in your 301s or take a ranking bath.
- Canonical your site. That will fix the duplicate problem easily.
- Why Wordpress? Consider a forum instead. A forum invites conversation and natively creates fresh content.
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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Joomla Title Help - Plugin?
I am currently working on a site in Joomla (2.5) and continue to run across issues with titles. Currently, the site is set to display the page title just over the content. Turning this off really is not an option, as it is necessary to keep these titles as part of the content. Right now, my page titles are not well optimized. What I would like to have is a separate meta title used for SEO purposes, similar to what a plugin like Yoast would do in WordPress - where there is a name for a page (often used in content as well), but a meta title that is used by Google. Hope that makes sense. If anyone knows of a plugin that may be helpful, that would be great. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DeliaAssociates0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Optimizing Flash websites
Does anyone know the latest on how well Google is indexing flash sites? I'm talking to a prospect now whose site is 100% flash, but looking at it all the content within the site is indexed and returning in the results. This is promising enough, but does anyone know exactly how well Google is indexing flash content these days and are there still any problems with that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
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 -
Duplicate Page Title with Pretashop
We have our main website and blog in Wordpress under www.enasport.com and our shop with Prestashop under www.enasport.com/productos so all our products have for example www.enasport.com/productos/56-creatina-monohidrato.html I wonder if this is the problem with Duplicate Page Title as seems we have more than 200 of this issue. Is there any way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | ENASports0 -
Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
Good afternoon. I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past. I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this. The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology. Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain. The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Geelong
Drew0