Duplicate Content?
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My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.)
But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it?
Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
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The best way to go is to put all your newsletters in on folder and and disallow the folder in your robot.txt.
rel nofollow & robot.txt are only read by google bot, your visitors won't be affected and will be able to navigate & search the archives without problem.
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Hi Sarah,
If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.
What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?
Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.
The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.
If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.
... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.
Hope this helps,
Mike
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Hi Mike,
That was fast. I copied some of the report from Seomoz "Crawled Diagnostics." Some do have the same titles, which was an edition after many years. The early newsletters I didn't even title, so they have a "default title" of the url.
I happened on SEOmoz, because I am trying to figure out why after so many years of having been on the first or second page of Google search results, we are lucky to show up on page 10 or deeper, if at all.
So I'm trying out SEOmoz to see if this will help us get back on top!
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The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr10.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb06.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive13_Feb07.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr08.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr09.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr11.html 1 18 1 The Sunday School Teacher's Network Newsletter - Great ideas for children's ministry!
http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Apr12.html 1 18 1 http://sundayschoolnetwork.com/archive14_Feb06.html
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thank u. I'm gonna do that!
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You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.
I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com
The issue with this, that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.
As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.
Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results. The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.
If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.
That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.
The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!
I hope that helps.
Mike
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HI Mike,
Thank you. To change all the titles is a huge task, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think I'll put them in a folder and mark the page link to that folder with a nofollow. As to the canoncalization of the two names, I have marked one of them as the top one in Google Analytics. But I have a much greater problem than that. I have several domain names that are on the same server and that all point to the one domain (same files and folders). I have been attempting to get my server techs to do a 301 redirect so that only http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com displays in a browser. However, every time they attempt to do it, part or all of my site stops working correctly.
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Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.
That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.
Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!
Mike
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Yes, on Google webmaster...sorry. And it's apache.
thank u!
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Cool. No worries
StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.
If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect
You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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