Duplicate content - working with CMS constraints
-
Hi,
We use an industry-specific CMS and I'm struggling to figure out how we can fix duplicate content issues.
Thankfully, the vendor has agreed to work on 301 vs 302 redirects.
However, they aren't currently able to give us the ability to add rel=canonical tags to page headers (we've put it in their "suggestion box" which tends to take a long time, if ever, to materialize).
My understanding is that the tag will not be recognized if it's in the body code, correct? (aka the part of the page we can edit from the CMS)
Is there anything else I can do?
-
You're very welcome, we're all in this google together.
I know that issue all too well, happens a lot with sitemap pages, sites that don't declare one type or url structure so they have site.com/ and site.com.
I'm kinda surprised the CMS doesn't redirect the url when you create the friendly url, but glad they agreed to work on it, I would utilize your best offense and get the other customers of the CMS to upvote and squeak their wheels. Since this also seems like a case of a CMS missing crucial features for site growth.
If they don't fix this promptly, consider if possible a switch to a more commonly used CMS like Drupal, Wordpress or even Joomla, all are established for years with these kinda issues already worked out and in some cases extra addons to help assist. But understand, often the choice of CMS isn't always up to us.
It does seem like for now, best you can do is try and reduce what you can on that page, but could be that the issue will keep presenting itself until the root cause is contained.
-
Thanks for your replies!!
There are a few instances of duplicate content where we can actually delete, but mostly it's many URLs going to the same page due to the structure of the site, ie:
http://www.sanjuan.edu/Domain/2396 (this is the URL for the "section" that houses many pages)
http://www.sanjuan.edu/Page/4808 (this is the URL for the page)
http://www.sanjuan.edu/family (this is the friendly URL that we've created that in an ideal world we'd have be the rel=canonical)
I will ask other districts using the CMS to upvote my suggestion in the vendor's suggestion box...I guess that may be the best I can do...
-
Ahh yes, this is a very niche product, they just haven't had enough users to bring up all the various features that are desired. Or just don't understand SEO and how to develop for it, which is something many CMS providers have dealt with or are dealing with.
From reading through the editor guide pdf, seems it really gives you the basic options of site editing, no backend or much frontend control in that aspect either.
Can I ask why the duplicate content can't be deleted? Is it that it's one content piece but being displayed on various pages? If it's not too much content being duplicated, you might be ok.
-
We're a K-12 and use a CMS called Schoolwires: http://www.schoolwires.com/
(I'm worried since it's so niche we might be out of luck...)
-
Yes you're right, needs to be in the header,
What CMS is this? The resulting answer would be what determines the possible alternatives. Drupal was one I worked with for a few years and still do, modules and some template editing was what solves some SEO issues I've had experience with. But again, not all CMS are created equal.
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
-
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Do you think my client is being hit for duplicate content?
Wordpress website. The client's website is http://www.denenapoints.com/ The URL that we purchase so that we could setup the hosting account is http://houston-injury-lawyers.com, which shows 1 page indexed in Google when I search for site:http://houston-injury-lawyers.com On http://www.denenapoints.com/ there is <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/"> But on http://houston-injury-lawyers.com it says the same thing, <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/" /> Is this how it should be setup, assuming that we want everything to point to http://denenapoints.com/? Maybe we should do a 301 redirect to be 100% Sure? Hopefully I explained this well enough. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts, thanks!
Technical SEO | | georgetsn0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Is this considered Duplicate Content?
Good Morning, Just wondering if these pages are considered duplicate content? http://goo.gl/t9lkm http://goo.gl/mtfbf Can you please take a look and advise if it is considered duplicate and if so, what should i do to fix... Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How do I fix duplicate content with the home page?
This is probably SEO 101, but I'm unsure what to do here... Last week my weekly crawl diagnostics were off the chart because http:// was not resolving to http://www...fixed that but now it's saying I have duplicate content on: http://www.......com http://www.......com/index.php How do I fix this? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jgower0 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0