Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
-
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site.
As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products).
My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this.
My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com
Robin
-
Thanks for your reply Ryan. I am going to war on the bad links and have got over half of them removed already. There are one or two quite shocking examples of the manipulative linking you describe, and when I dug deeper into those sites I was utterly appalled.
-
Hi Robin,
It is important to understand the difference between Penguin and Panda.
Penguin focuses solely on a single issue: manipulative links to your site. By far the most effective solution is to remove the bad links. Penguin does not care about whether your content is duplicated or any other aspect of your site's quality.
Panda is a different update which focuses on content quality. While it is possible your site has multiple issues, you have diagnosed your issue as Penguin and stated you experienced a major traffic drop in April 2012. If that drop was on or immediately after April 24th, and you have built manipulative links to the site, it is highly likely the issue is Penguin.
A quick review of your site's backlinks in Open Site Explorer shows a large number of links which Penguin is designed to penalize....directory links and other low quality links.
I hope this information is helpful.
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
-
Content on product category pages - does Google care?
Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?
On-Page Optimization | | BarryBuckman0 -
Duplicate Content - Bulk analysis tool?
Hi I wondered if there's a tool to analyse duplicate content - within your own site or on external sites, but that you can upload the URL's you want to check in bulk? I used Copyscape a while ago, but don't remember this having a bulk feature? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate Content, http vs https
Hi All! I just discovered that a client of ours a duplicate content issue. Essentially they have approximately 20 pages that have an http and an https version. Is there a better way to handle this than a simple 301? Regards, Frank
On-Page Optimization | | FrankSweeney0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Duplicate content shown in Google webmaster tools for 301 redirected URLs.
Why does Google webmaster tools shows 5 URLs that have been 301 redirected as having duplicate meta descriptions?
On-Page Optimization | | Madlena0 -
If a site has https versions of every page, will the search engines view them as duplicate pages?
A client's site has HTTPS versions of every page for their site and it is possible to view both http and https versions of the page. Do the search engines view this as duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | harryholmes0070 -
Crawl error: duplicate title for home page
I'm seeing a duplicate title for the home page, both the static file name and the domain. like: http://domain.com
On-Page Optimization | | joshcanhelp
http://domain.com/index.cfm I know how to set this in Google Analytics but how would I make sure this isn't seen as an error? It's accounting for both a duplicate title and duplicate content. Thanks!0 -
Magento Layered Navigation & Duplicate Content
Hello Dear SeoMoz, I would like to ask your help with something that I am not sure off. Our ecommerce web site is built with Magento. I have found many problems so far and I know that there will be many more in the future. Currently, I am trying to find the best way to deal with the duplicate content that is produced from the layered navigation (size, gender etc). I have done a lot of research so far in order to understand which might be the best practice and I found the following practices: **Block layered navigation URLSs from the Google Webmaster Tools (**Apparently this works for Google Only). Block these URLs with the robots.txt file Make links no-follow **Make links JavaScript from Magento *** Avoid including these links in the xml site map. Avoid including these link in the A-Z Product Index. Canonical tag Meta Tags (noindex, nofollow) Question If I turn the layered navigation links into JavaScript links from the Magento Admin, the layered navigation links are still found by the crawlers but they look like that: | http://www.mysite.com/# instead of: http://www.mysite.com/girls-basics.html?gender_filte... | Can these new URLS (http://www.mysite.com/# ) solve the duplicate content problems with the layered navigation or do I need to implement other practices too to make sure that everything is done right. Kind Regards Stefanos Anastasiadis
On-Page Optimization | | alexandalexaseo0