Duplicate Content Question

[sportstvjobs]

Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique.

Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does  that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently?

I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue?

Thanks

Brian Clapp

[AdoptionHelp]

This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/

The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
  # Redirect adoptionhelp.org to www.adoptionhelp.org
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.adoptionhelp.org [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adoptionhelp.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.

[blackballonline]

1. In addition to your 301 redirect issue Ryan mentioned you are internally linking to the non www version for your logo link: (this leaks juice on the redirect as well if you are going for the www version)

2 ) You really want to choose one version and go with it everywhere (be precise down to the trailing slash) - Google webmaster tools has a setting for this as well - sign up and choose your preferred setting / then save if you haven't already

3. Make the changes and check Open Site Explorer for both versions to see your links that appear the non-preferred way and see if you can contact your external linking sources to fix the issue to the preferred URL

4. I didn't see any canonical for the other pages (other than the home page) add those as well

5. Rerun OSE after your next crawl completes or use Xenu for immediate testing for the internal links - external may take a bit longer.

[sportstvjobs]

Thank you for your great response Dave! I'm the founder of the site, but my background is more in content and I'm learning the SEO as I go, so forgive me if this is a silly follow up.

In reference to response #4 - my original designer said canonical was only on the home page, but your response sounds like it should be on every page? If so do I put the whole url for that page, or just the root? Again not an expert here so all this advice really helps me learn.

Thanks

Brian

[sportstvjobs]

Ryan thanks for your great advice. I'm the site founder but by no means a tech expert... I'm more the content guy, but I'm learning. I

understand what you have written...all except the part of where I put that code. Where do I find my .htaccess file?

[TheOceanAgency]

Something that was challenging for me at first was finding .htaccess file. It should be in the root directory of where all of you website files are stored. It may be hidden or you may need to create one. If its hidden, find out how to un-hide files in your specific FTP program. If you need to create it, simply create a blank file with the name .htaccess and paste the recommendation that Ryan made.

[sportstvjobs]

less than 24 hours into my seomoz pro membership and I'm already blown away - thanks for all of your assistance. Christine it appears I don't have a .htaccess file so I will follow what you wrote and create a new blank file with just that code in it...

you guys rock. I've got lots more learning to do....

Brian

[TheOceanAgency]

its pretty awesome. Welcome

[blackballonline]

You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page:

In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical

Hope this helps