Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
How can I determine if the cause is canonical or duplicate content?
I really don't know what to do :(
Is the orginal page site ranked?
Here's how to check:
site:mysite.tld -www
(assumes your canonical page is
www.mysite.tld) If you see any results, then you have both a canonical page and duplicate content problem. A 301 rewrite mysite.com => www.mysite.com will gradually fix both.
I did the 301 redirect non-www to www thingy about a month ago and have been watching the non-www pages swapping to the www versions in the index which is of passing interest.
What I do not see changing is the /index.html listed as supplemental.
So I have redirected the .com/index.html to .com/ in in the hopes that maybe ...just maybe this will rid the index of the suplemental /index.html and perhaps...just perhaps, allow the site to rank again for its content.
Right now it does not rank for anything, not even the most obscure terms mentioned on its pages.
I have no idea if I should just abandon this site, as it is completely dead traffic wise(since Sept 22nd)...
Sticky me anyone who wants to know what the site is.
Cheers.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login).
That site will give reports from G on your site. Particularly useful are Stats ( Query stats ¦ Crawl stats ¦ Page analysis ¦ Index stats) and Errors tabs ( HTTP errors ¦ Unreachable URLs ¦ URLs restricted by robots.txt ¦ URLs not followed ¦ URLs timed out).
Well worth while, and does not take too much time or effort.
PS
My rewrite was put in place in Feb, and many, many pages have still not yet got their correct canonical designation - massive numbers of supplementals + URL-only. As I said, it is slowly getting better.
site:mysite.tld -www
What does this translate to exactly?
I just tried it for one of my sites and got 2 pages, both listed as supplemental results. 1 of them is a Flash file(!?)
Is there a definitive, tried and tested 301 code I can use to redirect all non-www to www?
The redirect did take care of the problem other than that.
Thanks,
Carol
I had a similar problem with mod rewrite last year, it took me three months to get the site ranking in G again after the mod rewrite - in this occasion I think it was due to the sudden increase in pages been indexed by G
"> duplicate - Is the orginal page site ranked? "
I am not sure what you mean by this. My "original content" site has had snippets stolen which now appear on other sites all over the web. Nothing new there.
My site (the original) does not rank for anything, so I guess the answer to your question is No.
?
Google shows 108,000,000
lol
site:yahoo.com -www -personals -quote -finance -uk -movies etc etc
and I cant be bothered to find all the subdomains to see if Google have yahoo.com pages listed.
However on a simpler site, some internal page listed in a site:domain.com -www is not as bad as the homepage being listed.
What seems to happen is that Google can get confused as to picking the root url - so duplicate homepage listed on the non-www versus the www is where the problem really seems to stem.
I don't think that the supplimental message means that its a duplicate content issue, this is one of the reasons, but from other examples that I have seen, it's been where a page is no longer linked from any other page within the website, and G is slowly removing the page from its' index.
Not true. The 1 page I've got as supplemental is definitely part of the site. But the other one (Flash file) is indeed an old version that is no longer used.
in this example (site:mysite.tld -www) exactly how do you replace your web site URL in it? ... is the space supposed to be there after the tld?
.tldstands for "Top-Level-Domain" (.com, .co.uk, whatever). And yes, there is a space there. I guess, to make it totally generic, if your home page--the Canonical page for your site--is supposed to be:
subdomain.domain.tldthen the search command is:
site:domain.tld -subdomainSo, for WebmasterWorld, this translates as "
site:webmasterworld.com -www".
If you then find any results, these are duplicates and, as Dayo_UK (the world expert on this!) says, if you find your Home page listed, then your entire site is wrongly listed by G. Bad, bad, bad.
You understand that, as soon as G finds pages that it considers to be duplicates of each other, it chooses one as the "canonical"--which it puts in the main index--and puts all others into the Supplemental index. If your Home page is duplicated, and G has chosen the 'wrong' version (how does it know which to choose?), then your entire site may be in the Supplemental index - down in the brown and smelly.
One extra to watch out for is the translation of "index.html" pages:
subdomain.domain.tld/If *both* the above are legal on your site, there will be duplicates. Your site needs a 301 from one to the other (whichever you choose).
subdomain.domain.tld/index.html
Finally, 302s from other sites can lead to them being chosen as the Canonical site. Yikes! And still not fully fixed by G.
How do I redirect /index.htm page to www.mydomain.com/? I tried the standard way and got a loopback.
I am not sure what you mean by this. My "original content" site has had snippets stolen which now appear on other sites all over the web. Nothing new there.
this could be the reason for your site's demise. You need to track down everyone who copied your content and write the host, supplying them with proof of your being the original author. You may have to send in a DMCA report but often they will either remove the content or the whole website.
Your site may not recuperate till they are all removed.
Searc for "stop stolen content" for instructions.
