I have a duplicate content problem

[OhYeahSteve]

The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?

[Sebes]

A site:pmaaustin.com showed 19 pages indexed. All of which with www.

Calling a non www. version of a page returned
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:16:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.pmaaustin.com/index.php?q=node/18

So everythings looks good....

[OhYeahSteve]

Thank you for your help, but according to the Crawl Dignostics for this website's SEOMoz Campaign, I have 16 pages of duplicate content. Should I discard this info.?

[Sebes]

I would not worry too much about that info. You rank well for a term like "austin tx martial arts" so everything seems good.

On a sitenode: If you ever want to reuse content and check how similar two pages are you could use a service like http://utext.rikuz.com/en/ to test it algorythmically.

Hope this answers your questions.

[RyanKent]

Hi Steve.

Log into Google WMT and go to the Home page. From there press the "Add a Site" button. You will most likely see the non-www version of your site listed. Add the www version of your site.

Next, go through the process of confirming your site. When your site was originally set up your website developer probably added the code to your web page or web server, so it may already be there. Try to confirm the code without actually adding anything to your site or server. If you receive an error, then go ahead and follow Google's instructions.

Once your site is verified, you will then be able to go to Site Configuration > Settings > Set Preferred Domain.

Decide which version you prefer for your site and stick with it. It looks like you are already set up to use "www" so I would recommend using that URL style unless you had a specific reason to change it.

EDIT: I can't help but offering a bit of feedback regarding your site. These are just suggestions so feel free to disregard any you don't care for:

• Change the "Facebook" block to the same color as Facebook pages. Your current green color blends in too much with everything else. It needs to stand out and be easy to find.

• Update your copyright to 2011

• Add a meta description tag to your pages. This tag wont help you rank better, but it will often be visible to users and may influence whether they click through to your site.

• Add ALT tags to your images, and try to align your image names with your keywords when possible. Presently they have names such as "teens" where "teen martial arts" might more accurately describe the image, and help you rank better.

You have other opportunities, but the above will help get you moving in the right direction. If you have a chance, I highly recommend reading the SEO Beginners Guide as it contains a lot of great information.

[OhYeahSteve]

Thank you for helping me through this issue. I was worried I'd be facing a penalty for the duplicate content and am glad to get it corrected. This site has Drupal as it's CMS and it's been a bear trying to change/add/update anything. There are a number of problems with this site - it doesn't show the Description tags even though I have them filled out.You can see this on View Source that there's no Descriptions tags. Any changes I have wanted to make can't be changed like the Facebook button and Alt tags, by me anyway.

I'm working on a new Wordpress website to replace this one with. Again, thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Steve

[Sebes]

Hey Steve,

if you are searching for a good CMS take a look at contao (www.contao.org) a german open source CMS. I run it on a couple of sites such as (www.waescherei-suche.de). It's site-based and has everything out of the box (newsletter, calendar-entries, user management etc.) There are tons of plugins and upgrades for nearly all kind of purposes. If you run a small site with a few pages this might be the thing you are looking for.

Sebastian

EDIT: it's in English..

[OhYeahSteve]

Thanks for the help!