Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I had a product page that ranked well for a particular search and unfortunately because of my own stupidity I was displaying the same product in a "Popular Products" section of my site with a different page name but the same text and image. Well of course you know what happened; Google nuked one of the pages. I'll let you guess which one
So my question is: What is the best way to fix the problem? Do I nuke the new page and just let Google 404 on it? Do I 301 the new page to the old? What is the best way to handle this?
Thank you for your help.
Do you mean that if you added &filter=0 to Google's address, the "missing" page was not there, or that it was?
DerekH
I have a similar problem - whereby the correct page shows if you add &filter=0 - what do you suggest to rectify that type of thing
UK Web Guy
Since I posted this topic I've used Google's delete url page to delete the duplicate page as well as added a "noindex, nofollow" meta tag to the page.
Is there anything else I can do to hasten the original page coming back?
Thank you.
What can be discovered using this?
Generally, it's because you've tripped a per-page duplicate filter.
It doesn't seem to be serious, it's a genuine filtering operation by Google to slim down bloated SERPS by removing duplicates.
You should find that a page that's suppressed with &filter=1 and visible with &filter=0 simply has too much in common with another page.
How much is too much?
Hard to say, because template-based pages always have a lot in common before we start, and these seem to be OK.
I'd suggest a different title, a different <h1> and a different opening sentence are musts, and possibly the ALT on images should be representative of the image and not used to secrete keywords!
DerekH
It's the same flag that gets set if Google ends the search with the message
"In order to show you the most relevant....."
Clicking on that achieves the same.
For you as a webmaster, if a lot of pages get suppressed with &filter=1 (the default), it's a sign that you could do better by optimising the pages that go missing, for a different keyword instead - after all, they'll never do as well as the page that causes them to be hidden.
It's an opportunity!
DerekH
That applies to dupe content between sites? How much dupe conent on the sames site (i.e. what percentage of a page can safely be similar to others on your site?
