Duplicate Content

[BellyBellyKelly]

Hello (and help help help!!!)

I have issues with duplicate content and duplicate meta descriptions which I need help with, and my developer isn't much of a help (in fact I think he may have caused some of the problems because he doesn't understand this properly).

After running Moz through the site yesterday, its picked up lots of duplicate content, for example:

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth

This is a main category of the site so I don't understand where the duplicate is. I have spent a good hour or two (when I am very time poor and have a bub) trying to find out where I can find exactly what its saying are the duplicate pages. I am wondering if its because of a change from www.bellybelly to bellybelly.com.au. Either way, I need to know how to fix this. I have 301 redirects in place, but it is still picking it up.

Another potential problem may have been the switch from /articles/[category name] to /[category name].

E.g. bellybelly.com.au/articles/pregnancy to bellybelly.com.au/pregnancy

The developer promised me he redirected it all, but I dont think he did it properly. I had to make some 301's, including this one which is still coming up in Moz analytics as being a problem:

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth/cord-clamping-delaying-cord-clamping

So I don't understand that one. I checked via terminal and its definitely there as a 301.

Also, I have very large forum which have duplicate meta tags which I think are mainly from sections I have marked for google to not index, so it takes the meta description from the forum home page.

I think I may need to hire someone to help me out with this, it all seems to be an issue requiring a bit of time and its something I don't have much of.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[AngelDigital]

Hi Kelly!

Have you tried downloading the crawl report for the section on pages with duplicate content (top right there's a link to download CSV)? This should help you identify what other pages Moz is picking up as having the same content.  If we knew what other pages are being identified as dupes it might give us a clue as to what's going on there.

How is the report identifying http://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth/cord-clamping-delaying-cord-clamping as a problem?

[BellyBellyKelly]

Thanks Jen, sorry I am still learning where everything is around here

Have downloaded the report just now - the report is over 10,000 pages so its huge, but I can now see URLs its reporting as dupes. This is very strange, its saying this is a dupe:

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth ==> http://www.bellybelly.com.au/5-sleep-options-for-your-baby-where-will-your-baby-sleep (which is very strange - the second is an article in the baby sleep section, but has no category in the url).

I can see a capitalisation error:

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/Breastfeeding ==> http://www.bellybelly.com.au/breastfeeding and vice versa (should I just 301 this?)

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/forums/f196/ ==> http://www.bellybelly.com.au/forums/f193 (and vice versa)

http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/doulas ==> http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/pregnancy-photography|http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/acupuncture-and-chinese-medicine|http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/midwives|http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/birth-education|http://www.bellybelly.com.au/directory/tas/pre-and-post-natal-massage

(yikes?!)

Here are some for starters!

[KaneJamison]

Let me try and tackle these one by one:

Capitalization:

Yes - typically you can handle this with a server-level redirect that forces all URLs to be lower case. Google will see the upper case version as a separate page, and that's why it's getting flagged as duplicate content. Be sure to double check that this is being process as a 301 and not a 302. Wheregoes.com is an easy quick way to check.

5 Sleep Options:

I'm not sure why, but http://www.bellybelly.com.au/5-sleep-options-for-your-baby-where-will-your-baby-sleep is producing a list of articles almost identical to the ones being shown at /birth. So, that's the cause for the duplicate content here. I'm guessing it's a CMS error of some kind.

f196 vs f193:

These are showing as duplicate because there's nothing unique on the page except for Queensland vs Victoria. You'll need to find a way to highlight threads that are about Queensland or about Victoria to make this page useful, or you can simply "noindex, follow" these pages so that the duplicate content is irrelevant.

/tas/doulas vs tas/etc., etc.

These are duplicate content because they all say "No advertisers found matching your criteria." That's it. They need to have some real actual content, otherwise there's no reason for them to exist. For these directory listings, try creating a bunch of free listings to serve as temporary filler and it will also encourage other competitors that they should consider doing a listing as well.