Duplicate Index Content

Getting ready for the Jan update

[VictorE]

My site has been the ugly duckling after every dance since she came online in August, but I am working on getting her prettied up for the January Dance.

Currently, I have a random testimonial generator on each page of my website. This means that although they are the same page, it is possible for [mysite].com and mysite.com/default.asp to have slightly different content. I think I read somewhere that this can cause a problem during a crawl. Perhaps Google would create two entries in the index for [mysite].com and [mysite].com/default.asp.

Is this something I should be worried about changing before the next deep crawl?

Regards,

Vic

[Brett_Tabke]

Welcome to the board victor.

Yes, random stuff causes that effect. I'd put all the random stuff into a an iframe. Or, make the random nature of it, much longer (say it switches every day).

[VictorE]

Brett,

Thanks for the warm welcome. I really appreciate you clearing this up for me. I just implemented the changes you suggested (daily change).

Vic

[Brett_Tabke]

I know what you are up against. Look in the top right corner. That little diddy is random. What can I say - I cloak it off from the bots just so it's not feeding them random stuff all the time.

[VictorE]

Regarding my previous messages ...

After looking at the December update, I now have 3 versions of my homepage in the index:

1) [www.mysite.com]
2) [www.mysite.com]/default.asp
3) [[mysite.com]...]

It appears that my random testimonial generator was responsible for #2. The cached versions of #1 and #2 are different because of the different testimonial. As I mentioned above, I think I have fixed this problem per Brett's recommendation.

#3 seems to be due to the links on my credit card page. On my credit card page, my HTML only links to /[page].asp, instead of [[mysite.com]...] When the credit card page is brought up securely (https://), all of the links on my that page point to [[mysite.com]...] Other pages linked from my credit card page ended up in the index with a http:// version and a https:// version. I believe I have fixed this problem by putting the full http:// path for all of my links.

I am curious ... could these duplicates could be affecting my rankings in Google's SERPs? I made some more progress in this month's rankings, but I was just wondering if this could be holding me back. Also wondering if these duplicates could be affecting my PR calculations.

Oh well, live and learn. I am mainly just posting this so others can avoid my mistakes. Hopefully everything will be okay after the Jan update.

Wishing everyone a great 2003 ...

Vic

[VictorE]

Argh! Well, I checked my logs today and find out that Googlebot was out spidering my site for the January update. Looks like Google spidered [www.mysite.com] yesterday and [www.mysite.com]/default.asp today. As per my changes above, Google saw slightly different content each day. So, I am guessing I will have duplicate content in the index again next month.

Looks like I need to just make the page static.

Vic