Duplicate Content - Big Issue

draneb · Post by **draneb** » Fri Dec 12, 2008 9:42 pm

Well, my AC5.5 site had a Google PageRank of 4/10. After upgrading My AC7.0 site now has a Google Pagerank of 0/10. A big, fat, zero.

I went into Google Base Webmaster Tools and notice some BIG issues with duplicate content.

I have hundreds of pages with duplicate titles and duplicate descriptions. As far as Google can tell you are trying to spam their search results. In the Google Base Webmaster Tools you can view the problems.

This is causing the duplicate content:

1) Upgrading from AC5.5 to AC7.0 causes there to be pages indexed by Google with URLs such as this
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1.aspx
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1C1.aspx

2) Google is crawling site URLs with the AFID ending.
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1C1.aspx?afid=1
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1C1.aspx?afid=6

All of these pages have the same dynamically created titles and descriptions.

What can the solution be for this? I can't believe I am searching Google and all of my pages in the search results are gone.

meer2005 · Post by **meer2005** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 12:53 am

This was always a big concern of mine. First of all, you need to do 301 redirects from your old 5.5 pages to your new 7.0 pages. A 301 redirect will tell the search engines that you page as moved and lets the engine know where it has moved to. This will also transfer any page ranks you had built up in with your old pages.

I really wish there was more support for 301 redirects within AC to make migrations much easier and done with out any page rank interruptions. Especially when a lot of sites are dealing with thousands of pages that are dynamically generated. There are a number of posts on the forum that talk about 301 redirects; however most of them have not really worked for me with dynamic pages. If you have access to the web server, you can do 301 redirects within IIS, but I think you have to do them one by one, and that’s providing you have access to the machine.

If it is just your home page that you're talking about that the page rank is zero, that's because 5.5 was index.aspx and 7.0 is default.aspx for the home page. If you create a page named index.aspx, insert the code below, and upload, your old index.aspx page will be redirected... and as long your change was recently, your page rank should transfer over to default.aspx within a couple months:

Code: Select all

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Layouts/Scriptlet.master" Inherits="CommerceBuilder.Web.UI.AbleCommercePage" Title="Redirect" %>

<script runat="server">
   
    
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string redirectLocation = "http://www.sitename.com/default.aspx";
        Response.Clear();
        Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
        Response.AddHeader("Location", redirectLocation);
        string pageContent = "<html><head><title>Object moved</title></head><body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This object may be found at <a href=\"{0}\">{0}</a>.</body></html>";
        Response.Write(string.Format(pageContent, redirectLocation));
        Response.End();
    }
</script>

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=8004
This post talks about two different solutions for doing 301 redirects in bulk. Site director did not work for me with dynamic pages. I was trying to redirect an old 7.0 page to a new 7.0 page. It just didn’t work for that. It might work for you being that you have old 5.5 links that you’re redirecting to a new 7.0 page.

The second is http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/
This works, but it’s something you have to install on the web server and then it makes IIS work a lot like .htaccess.txt file on apache.

As far as the duplicate pages, I think the categorygrid4 page is the only one that includes the category in the url (product-name-P246C49.aspx), everywhere else on the site it will show up as product-name-P246.aspx (doesn’t include category number). of course, being that it writes the url different in different parts of the site, it results in duplicate pages.

You can either change your category page to something other than categorygrid4, or you can customize categorygrid4 to display the urls with the product number only in the url. There is info on this post here on how to customized categorygrid4: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7034

The ?afid=6 is an affiliate link. I don't know why you would have affiliate links within your own site. Maybe those are links that some of your affiliates posted??

jmestep · Post by **jmestep** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 8:35 am

First of all- draneb and I don't have a problem between us- I just don't have time to do his work as quickly as before. I'm posting so others can get help from the topic.
Before his Able 7 site went live, we had changed all the category display pages to take the C out of the URL because that is the way the links were in most places and the product feeds generated product links without the C in the URL. I need to put a redirect on the pages so that if there is a category C in the URL it does a 301 redirect to the same URL without a C in it. I need to code to look for a pattern ending in C[numbers].aspx.
He already has an index.aspx with a 301 redirect on it.
I think the problem with the other links with the AFID might have been caused by the AFID in his Googlebase feed changing on the new site (I'm not sure it has) or one of his other product feeds (like shopping.com) where Google is picking up links that they generate.
Able 7 just isn't as good as Able 5 was on SEO. We have had to customize things and it's even hard to find out where to customize them to do it in a uniform way. There is a lot of script garbage on the pages before the spider even gets to the content. The <h1> tags that displayed the product name above the header on the product pages is gone.

afm · Post by **afm** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 11:58 am

This article by 2 people in Google's Search Quality Team explains how rewriting URLs can get you into trouble,

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... -urls.html

According to the article, Google can't tell that these 2 URLs point to the same resource (so they perceive this as 2 different resources with duplicate content),

http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1.aspx
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name-P1C1.aspx

But they could if the URL was not rewritten,

http://www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=1
http://www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?Prod ... tegoryID=1

Perhaps best of all would be something like this since it puts the name in the URL and leaves the parameters in place so Google can figure out which ones are extra

http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx?ProductID=1
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx ... tegoryID=1

Since draneb has already lost his ranking, now might be a good time to consider if there is the better (more sustainable) way of rebuilding his links. The article above encourages less rewriting.

draneb · Post by **draneb** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 12:27 pm

Andy, that sounds like a great idea. Or to try and keep the URL as short as possible, something like

http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx?p=1
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx?p=1&c=1

I don't know if it's asking a lot, but is this possible?

Just to give you an example of what has happened to me. I have 1,430 actual pages in my SiteMap.xml file.
When I go to Google and do a search for
site:www.mysite.com
it says there are 3,240 pages from http://www.mysite.com
That is more than double the amount of actual pages. I can see why I got the boot.

This is depressing. I have spent so many thousands of dollars on AC and customization work.

afm · Post by **afm** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 1:12 pm

draneb wrote:http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx?pid=1
http://www.mysite.com/Product-Name.aspx?pid=1&cid=1

I don't know if it's asking a lot, but is this possible?

I hope so. I have not looked to see if the current rewrites are embedded or pluggable. If pluggable, then other rewrite schemes (or no rewrites) should be possible.

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Sat Dec 13, 2008 3:41 pm

draneb wrote:Just to give you an example of what has happened to me. I have 1,430 actual pages in my SiteMap.xml file.
When I go to Google and do a search for
site:www.mysite.com
it says there are 3,240 pages from http://www.mysite.com
That is more than double the amount of actual pages. I can see why I got the boot.

My site stats within Google have notoriously been way off for as long as I can remember.

Currently the Google "site:" reports 12,500 on my site. Yet, I have a product catalog of 9,938 records and use every CategoryGrid control with the majority being CategoryGridPage4. If Google were duplicating my URLs based on the usage of CategoryGridPage4, I should have 18,000+ easily.

Case in point: Trying doing link:www.mysite.com

For me, it reports 20. That's right. 20 teeny weeny little links BACK to my site. For a domain registered in 1995 and a web site that's been live for 13 years running. Not possible. Heck, I've got more than that just in my Able forum posts.

I don't trust those Google numbers.

Mike718NY · Post by **Mike718NY** » Sun Dec 14, 2008 1:50 pm

Don't know if this will help with SEO, but I want to display the
product name at the very top of the page before anything else.

This does it (in the very top of Header.htm page), but I want a default value
to display when the page is not a product page, . . like the same
text that is used in the Meta description tag:

#if($Product.Name == "")
default keywords for the website relevant to the site like, meta desc
#else
$Product.Name
#end

#if($Product.Name.Length==0) << not working either
......

both of these are not working.
"$Product.Name" is displayed at the top of the page when a page is not
a product page. The product name is displayed for product pages.
Anyone know how to code this?

Is doing this a good idea?

Post by **Logan Rhodehamel** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 10:30 am

There is a way to address duplicate content. For some reason I thought I posted this publicly but I missed it.

SEE: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nical.html

Specifying the canonical link can alleviate some of the problems related to links that sometimes have the C## in them. Many major search engines are respecting this new meta tag as it solves a common and frequent problem! It's easy to do in AbleCommerce 7....

OPEN: App_Data/PageHelper.cs

FIND:

Code: Select all

    public static void BindMetaTags(Page page, ICatalogable catalogObject)
    {
        if (catalogObject != null)
        {
            page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(catalogObject.HtmlHead));
        }
    }

REPLACE WITH:

Code: Select all

    public static void BindMetaTags(Page page, ICatalogable catalogObject)
    {
        if (catalogObject != null)
        {
            StringBuilder htmlHead = new StringBuilder();
            htmlHead.Append(catalogObject.HtmlHead);
            if (!catalogObject.HtmlHead.Contains("<link rel=\"canonical\""))
            {
                string canonicalFormat = "<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"{0}\" />";
                string objectUrl = page.ResolveUrl(catalogObject.NavigateUrl);
                htmlHead.Append(string.Format(canonicalFormat, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(objectUrl)));
            }
            page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(htmlHead.ToString()));
        }
    }

That will address the duplicate content issue that results from products being linked from multiple sources or with varying URL parameters. This change is made to the base product in the next release.

GrfxDan · Post by **GrfxDan** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 10:11 am

Logan_AbleCommerce wrote:...
OPEN: App_Data/PageHelper.cs

I'd like to apply this to my site new 7.0 site before it goes live but I can't find the "PageHelper.cs" file. Any suggestions?

draneb · Post by **draneb** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 10:13 am

Yes, it's in the /App_Code folder

draneb · Post by **draneb** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 10:23 am

Edited... I had posted the wrong information.

GrfxDan · Post by **GrfxDan** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:38 pm

Thanks draneb. I was looking in the App_Data folder as Logan said, thus the reason I couldn't find it.

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