Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google Webmaster tools is showing Duplicate Content on my site, which google says shouldn't really hurt my rankings, but something is. My traffic is down nearly 80% and no new posts are being indexed well in Google...they had been doing great for over 2 years with this site. I could post an item and within minutes I could fine my story on the front page for a particular topic.
My main concern is Webmaster tools is picking up Duplicate Meta
Descriptions on links ending with a trailing / and the exact link
without a /. On my site it is impossible to load a page without a
slash and if you try you are automatically 301 redirected to the link
with a trailing /
For Example:
http://www.example.com/2008/07/17/page-name/
http://www.example.com/2008/07/17/page-name
Yet both of those will lead to
http://www.example.com/2008/07/17/page-name/
I have adjusted my robots.txt, modified anything google sate was a duplicate title tag, and confirmed my 301 redirect.
A google rep responded with this:
the Googlebot since it looks like we're crawling and
indexing (but not showing in the index) your pages without the
trailing slash as well
Anyone seen this issue before for a site running smooth for 2.5 years and suddenly stops ranking well across the board?
[edited by: tedster at 7:13 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2008]
[edit reason] use example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
At any rate, since you've verified that the 301 redirect is in place, I doubt that duplicate urls are the source of your traffic loss. Just make sure that your pages always include the trailing slash in yourinternal links, and then move on.
If those are the only place where duplicate meta descriptions are being reported, then duplicate meta descriptions shouldn't be the issue issue.
I'd say dig into your data a bit and find out what search terms are not providing traffic that used to. To say only that traffic fell just isn't giving you enough information to uncover the issue.
Thanks for the welcome. I wouldn't say it is so much certain keywords no longer giving traffic...some still are but it is down. Because the topics are time sensitive, I update the site 5-10 times a day. When the site was working properly any post I submitted was indexed within 10 minutes and you could find it when you searched. Now new posts just don't show.
My area is more of hitting the hot story and getting quick traffic for 24-48 hours -- until the next story comes along. This is what i am trying to get back.
[edited by: tedster at 12:52 am (utc) on Aug. 21, 2008]
