Duplicate content vs. less content
-
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to.
In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content.
Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content.
Thanks for your help. Erik
-
|
This is from seomoz crawl report. mostly all of it is forum and user profiles.
Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57 Hobie Singlefin 9'4 Takeda Fish 5'7 | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/forum/hobie-singlefin-94-takeda-fish-57-0
|
WA Jer | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wa-jer wavekitegirl | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/wavekitegirl White Abbot | Surfing Nosara
http://www.surfingnosara.com/users/white-abbot |
|
-
The -0 is Drupal's way of handling duplicate page titles, duplicate file names etc. You may indeed have an issue where two "nodes" are being generated. If this is the case you are basically creating a competitor for yourself.
Do you want to share the site and two URL's that are duplicated?
-
Thank your for the responses. We have a popular ride board that is awesome, and some buy and sell... other than that most of our forum has moved to our Facebook page. About 1/3 of the duplicate content has a -0 after the title. I am not sure how to take it out from the robots.txt file.
i guess the heart of my questions is I have always thought that all the content from the forum would help us in SEO. Is it possible that it is really hurting us? How does google look at a site that has a ton of pages ( we are an old site that keeps all of our content so folks can search it, old surf reports...) but a ton of errors and duplicate content. How much will solving errors and duplicate content help vs. just working on more links? Where do i focus energy?
-
Don't take down a forum if it has an active community, instead focus on the canonical control of the forum. Depending on your Drupal set-up this could be tricky to implement. That being the case then you could always block Googlebot's access to the duplicated pages then remove the URLs from the index through GWT. The last option would be to review your Drupal template and insert a PHP conditional statement to issue a noindex,follow command in the robots meta tag, for certain pages. Look at the URLs and see if there's a pattern as to which pages are the 'duplicates' and try to match that pattern. Hope something here helped.
-
_I am assuming that you are referring internal duplicate content issue. In that case, I would rather suggest you to fix them by adding canonical or by adding noindex Meta data or by specifying some rules in robots.txt file. No need to remove the forum if it is adding value to user experience. However, if you feel that your forum is getting ruled by spammers and trolls, you should take down the whole thing. I hope that it would do good to your website in the long run. _
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
-
Duplicate Footer Content Issue
Please check given screenshot URL. As per the screenshot we are using highlighted content through out the website in the footer section of our website (https://www.mastersindia.co/) . So, please tell us how Google will treat this content. Will Google count it as duplicate content or not? What is the solution in case if the Google treat it as duplicate content. Screenshot URL: https://prnt.sc/pmvumv
Technical SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | | Wagada0 -
Duplicate title/content errors for blog archives
Hi All Would love some help, fairly new at SEO and using SEOMoz, I've looked through the forums and have just managed to confuse myself. I have a customer with a lot of duplicate page title/content errors in SEOMoz. It's an umbraco CMS and a lot of the errors appear to be blog archives and pagination. i.e. http://example.com/blog http://example.com/blog/ http://example.com/blog/?page=1 http://example.com/blog/?page=2 and then also http://example.com/blog/2011/08 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=1 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=2 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=3 (empty page) http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=4 (empty page) This continues for different years and months and blog entries and creates hundreds of errors. What's the best way to handle this for the SEOMoz report and the search engines. Should I rel=canonical the /blog page? I think this would probably affect the SEO of all the blog entries? Use robots.txt? Sitemaps? URL parameters in the search engines? Appreciate any assistance/recommendations Thanks in advance Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Dealing with duplicate content
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites. What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms. Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
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 -
Forget Duplicate Content, What to do With Very Similar Content?
All, I operate a Wordpress blog site that focuses on one specific area of the law. Our contributors are attorneys from across the country who write about our niche topic. I've done away with syndicated posts, but we still have numerous articles addressing many of the same issues/topics. In some cases 15 posts might address the same issue. The content isn't duplicate but it is very similar, outlining the same rules of law etc. I've had an SEO I trust tell me I should 301 some of the similar posts to one authoritative post on the subject. Is this a good idea? Would I be better served implementing canonical tags pointing to the "best of breed" on each subject? Or would I be better off being grateful that I receive original content on my niche topic and not doing anything? Would really appreciate some feedback. John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0