What is the best method to solve duplicate page content?

[MarkP_]

The issue I am having is an overwhelmingly large number of pages on cafecartel.com show that they have duplicate page content.

But when I check the errors on SEOmoz it shows that the duplicate content is from www.cafecartel.com not cafecartel.com.

So first of all, does this mean that there are two sites? and is this a problem I can fix easily? (i.e. redirecting the URL and deleting the extra pages)

Is this going to make all other SEO useless due to the fact that it shows that nearly every page has duplicate page content?

Or am I just completely reading the data wrong?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

You are reading the correct data. You should be redirecting the pages to cafecartel.com/.... this will eliminate the duplicate content issues. You also might be able to see the issue with the sitemap....if the website was converted from another website then the pages might still be attached.

Another option, less SEO favorable, but will eliminate the duplicate content, is figuring out where the pages are and then installing robot no follows....

This will help your SEO not hurt it. You are being penalized for the duplicate content.

Hope this helps....

[Copstead]

You need to setup your site Canonicalization so that you don't have the duplicates.  SEOmoz has a great article here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Since you are hosted on an Apache server, you will need to modify your .htaccess file in your root directory to take care of these.

Make sure you also setup the www or non www preference in GWT. (Google Webmaster Tools)

[MarkP_]

Thank you Brent, and Mark...

So taking your advice this is what happened...

At the tail end of last week, we implemented a 301 redirect to www.cafecartel.com, we adjusted the .htaccess file to implement it and it worked as far as always landing on www.cafecartel.com....BUT the errors didn't adjust after the crawl.

I fear that the mere existence of these links to cafecartel.com and www.cafecartel.com may need to be manually redirected for each page.

The pages that are showing the highest errors are the blog article pages, quote request pages, and the free download pages. These same pages have links going between pages on www.cafecartel.com and other blog sites, which we did as an organic SEO tactic. Is this possibly something that is causing errors?

Thank you all for your advice!

[Copstead]

The internal crawl report from SEOmoz is based on your internal links, not external inbound links.  So if there are any errors, it is in your site.

At a quick glance, I see that you have setup the 301 to www, but if you click into the blog (news), then you aren't at the www anymore.  http://cafecartel.com/ccsnews/ - (if wordpress, then it's just a simple settings change.)

Run a crawl test on it (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test) and keep on plugging away and fixing every issue until there are no more.

And make sure you use rel=canonical tags.  This will help out with the duplicate content as well. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

[MarkP_]

I had the htaccess redirect, but the ccsnews is a wordpress blog. When I had that re-direct going, the blog complained of too many re-directs. I've seen this happen before even on seomoz.

So I'm using a joomla redirect plug in. I'm thinking the wordpress has a redirect plug in also, just haven't installed it yet.

[Copstead]

the wordpress just has a setting under general settings for www or non www.