Dulpicate Content being reported

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

I have a new client whose first MA crawl report is showing lots of duplicate content.

The main batch of these are all the HP url with an 'attachment' part at the end such as:

www.domain.com/?attachment_id=4176

As far as i can tell its some sort of slide show just showing a different image in the main frame of each page, with no other content. Each one does have a unique meta title & H1 though.

Whats the best thing to do here ?

1. Not a problem and leave as is

2. Use the paremeter handling tool in GWT

3. Canonicalise, referencing the HP

or other solution ?

Many Thanks

Dan

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

Is the site running wordpress? If so it sounds like maybe a badly coded template which is showing links somewhere in the code to the attachments (if you click on the image in its normal page does it take you to the duplicate url you mention?). It would be best to find out where the linking is happening and correct it so the links are removed if at all possible. The Yoast plugin also has a setting where you can redirect attachment ids to their related post (its in the permalinks settings of the yoast plugin) - that might help solve the problem.

[donford]

Hi Dan,

If these pages have no SEO value then you can just stop them from being crawled, thus preventing any duplicate content penalties. If you see some backlinks (SEO value) to any of these then I would use Canonical.

robots.txt

User-agent:: *

Disallow: /*attachment_id

Hope it helps,

Don

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Lyn

Yes it is wp i think

If i click on the image it loads page with image (another duplicate) in the series next

I'm not sure what the normal page is since can only find these via the cralw reports, they dont seem to be linked to in any site nav etc

Does that sound to you then like best solution is via Yoast redirects etc ?

On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?

Cheers

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Many thanks Don

ill ask client but dont think so (doubt any links pointing to them) but due to varying kw rich meta titles and h1's think client may have implemented this for some seo reason (hes very seo savvy but bit old school) prob not aware needs more content on page beyond a pic & some meta & an h1.

On a side note do you think these could be dragging sites rankings down (there are 350 of them) ?

All Best

Dan

[donford]

Gotcha, definitely don't want to nix pages then. I would imagine Lynn's response is more appropriate then, it is likely that he is using a plugin that has been updated to better SEO practices that he hasn't yet updated.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

The robots must be getting the urls from somewhere so it is worth finding out where. If you download the moz report in csv and open in excel you can control-windows-L to get a filterable list. If you filter for duplicates and find these urls on the left then on the far right it should reference where they are being linked from. I suspect you will find pages in the site that have these images in them and are linking to the attachment_id urls (often it is from gallery pages).

Once you have found the pages, then try applying the yoast redirects and see if they work as expected (ie redirect the attachment_id links to the relevant gallery page for example). Ideally you would get rid of the links completely from the code - this will probably need a bit of dev work on the template but should be pretty straightforward since you are likely just removing the A tag from around the images.

[Dan-Lawrence]

cool cheers Don

[Dan-Lawrence]

Great stuff thanks Lynn !! Ill tell their dev to do that

many many thanks

All Best

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Sorry Lynn but what is the 'windows' bit in control-windows-L since cant see on my keyboard, can it have a different icon/symbol etc?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

Actually it looks like ctrl L will do it (you are creating an excel table). You usually need to erase the first few rows from the export so you have the column header in row 1 and then select all and create the table checking the 'my table has headers' so that you can then filter using the headers