Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
-
Hi,
I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do...
For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'.
Do you think this is right?
Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled?
Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time?
Thanks
FashionLux
-
One tricky point - you don't necessarily want to fix the duplicate URLs before you 301-redirect and clear out the index. This is counter-intuitive and throws many people off. If you cut the crawl paths to the bad URLs, then Google will never crawl them and process the 301-redirects (since those exist on the page level). Same is try for canonical tags. Clear out the duplicates first, THEN clean up the paths. I know it sounds weird, but it's important.
For malformed URLs and usability, you could still dynamically 301-redirect. In most cases, those bad URLs shouldn't get indexed, because they have no crawl path in your site. Someone would have to link to them. Google will never mis-type, in other words.
-
Hi Highland/Dr Pete,
My apologies I wasn't very clear - fixing the duplicate problem... or rather stopping our site from generating further duplicate content isn't an issue at all, I'm going to instruct our developers to stop generating dupe content by doing things like no longer passing variables in the URL's (mysite.com/page2?previouspage=page1).
However the problem is that for a lot of instances duplicate URL's work and they need to work - for example if a user types in the URL but gets one character wrong ('1q' rather than '1') then from a usability perspective its the correct thing to serve the content they wanted. You don't want to make the user have to stop, figure out what they did wrong and redo it - not when you can make it work seamlessly.
My question relates to 'once my site is no longer generating unnecessary duplicate content, what should I to do about the duplicate pages that have already made their way into the Index?' and you have both answered the question very well, thank you.
I can manually set-up 301 redirects for all of the duplicate pages that I find in the index, once they disappear from the index I can probably remove those 301's. I was thinking of going down the noindex meta tag route which is harder to develop.
Thanks guys
FashionLux
-
I DO NOT believe in letting Google sort it out - they don't do it well, and, since Panda (and really even before), they basically penalize sites for their inability to sort out duplicates. I think it's very important to manage your index.
Unfortunately, how to do that can be very complex and depends a lot on the situation. Highland's covered the big ones, but the details can get messy. I wrote a mega-post about it:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Without giving URLs, can you give us a sense of what kind of duplicates they are (or maybe some generic URL examples)?
-
Your options are
- De-index the duplicate pages yourself and save yourself the crawl budget
- 301 the duplicates to the pages you want to keep (preferred)
- Canonical the duplicate pages, which lets you pick which page remains in the index. The duplicate pages will still be crawled, however.
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
-
Orphan Duplicate is created as Subdomain in Google Search
We noticed that some of our results on google for the blog are also come up with subdomain that is not linked from anywhere on the website. For example: SUBDOMAIN1.website.com/blog/content.html -> it redirects to website.com/blog/content.html SUBDOMAIN1 is not linked anywhere on the website. How did the google find it in the first place? Why does it still keep it in the search results? How do you get rid of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rkdc0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hello! We have a lot of duplicate content issues on our website. Most of the pages with these issues are dictionary pages (about 1200 of them). They're not exactly duplicate, but they contain a different word with a translation, picture and audio pronunciation (example http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas). What's the better way of solving this? We probably shouldn't disallow dictionary pages in robots.txt, right? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Duplicate Multi-site Content, Duplicate URLs
We have 2 ecommerce sites that are 95% identical. Both sites carry the same 2000 products, and for the most part, have the identical product descriptions. They both have a lot of branded search, and a considerable amount of domain authority. We are in the process of changing out product descriptions so that they are unique. Certain categories of products rank better on one site than another. When we've deployed unique product descriptions on both sites, we've been able to get some double listings on Page 1 of the SERPs. The categories on the sites have different names, and our URL structure is www.domain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name.cfm. So even though the product names are the same, the URLs are different including the category names. We are in the process of flattening our URL structures, eliminating the category and subcategory names from the product URLs: www.domain.com/product-name.cfm. The upshot is that the product URLs will be the same. Is that going to cause us any ranking issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Can Google index PDFs with flash?
Does anyone know if Google can index PDF with Flash embedded? I would assume that the regular flash recommendations are still valid, even when embedded in another document. I would assume there is a list of the filetype and version which Google can index with the search appliance, but was not able to find any. Does anyone have a link or a list?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreas.wpv0 -
Penalised for duplicate content, time to fix?
Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix... I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died. I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere. I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content? The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page. Thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate content
I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0