I noticed a recent post on Arno Zijlstra's new blog about duplicate titles. He was linking to a recent post from Google where it was said that duplicate content was dead and buried and not an issue.
Unfortunately, I rather think the point might be being missed by everyone.
It used to be thought that duplicate content, something that Joomla is often guilty at creating, would earn you a penalty slap from Google. Those in the SEO community would often keep raising the issue as a concern, and Joomla dev's would maintain there was nothing to see, move along.
The reality is more subtle, there is no duplicate content penalty in Google, but duplicate content is an issue yet unresolved in Joomla.
The reason for a duplicate content "penalty" was because of scrape sites and general SEO naughtiness. Engaging in this practice would earn you a Google slap. Ouch!
Google then improved its algorithm and now claim no slapping is needed. Hurrah! They spiders are clever enough to figure out what is where.
"When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster."
But not so fast Mr Joomla.
Duplicate content in Joomla is caused by issues in the SEF routing (third party extensions can be just as guilty). I most often see it when page does not have a menu item associated with it, for example when the link comes from a category view and then also a module like Latest News. You end up with two links to the same page, for example:
- Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial (page rank 4)
- Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial (page rank 5)
Google does not seem to be able to spot these as duplicate content, and has treated them as separate page, each earning page rank. The problem is not just duplicate content, its pagerank dilution. With a single URL for that page, my PR 4 and 5 would be combined, hopefully with a slight bump.
To fix this we need a single URL for a page regardless of where it might exist. An *easy* fix would be to allow an option for the URL structure to be just:
/domain.com/ID-articletitle
instead of
/domain.com/menu/ID-articletitle
This would have the added (huge) bonus of not making all your inbound links you have worked hard to get become redundant when you move an article around in your site!
Do you have any pages with more than one pagerank in your site?
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Paul Mccann
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... All good points Barrie, im glad someone else noticed that the duplicate content is still a problem, just in a different way! The new URL rewriting is just going to get so confusing, although my take on it is very similar to Matt Cutts (lucky for me) who left a comment on that post you linked too. Basically if your going to re-write URLs do it properly. If your not sure how to do it, dont worry google will still get to your content. But does this mean keywords in URLs is now not as important as it maybe once was! |
Compass Design
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... Well, I think they still are. I have always called them "HUF" - HUman Friendly urls Have the keywords in the google search results gives higher CTR |
stevealledia
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... In addition to my post on Arno's blog I'd also point to this effective rebuttal: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblo...-this-one/ |
Wettie
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... As far as I know you always have your menu structure in your URL's? I had no problems with that. My problem was the redundand id-category par of the url. If you have menu pointing to category you have both the menu name and the id-category in your url - which are both the same (or probably similar). I wrote a few posts about this problem on Joomla forum, the problem was acknowledged (I'm not so much into Joomla community to know if it came from the right person  ). The answer I got was that in Joomla 1.6. the id-category part of the URL will be removed from the URL's. |
Compass Design
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...As far as I know you always have your menu structure in your URL's? The problem is that is not always true. When you have links that go to articles that might exist only on a section or category page, and then in modules, you get the duplicate URL's The example I give in the article with the tutorial links shows this. |
Hummerbie aka Pathos
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... Barrie, Thanks for your mail and this article pointing me to some new blogs. First thing, reading the lines "At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that." at the Google blog makes me think.... "At least not in that way?" So there might be one there? For scraper sites I hope! As for rewritting URLs to prevent duplicate content issues is fine by me, but as Paul said, you should do it properly which means all Dymanic URLs should be rewritten to just one static URL. That way you would not have the diluted pagerank issue. A good SEF component would be able to do just that, but not one is really that good, although sh404SEF comes close. Better yet is to use a Sitemap and a sitemap.xml file to provide the search engine robots with the URL that you would like to be indexed instead of leaving it up to the search engines to find out what they think is the best. A little guidance can help a lot (as a father you will know that:-)). My other thoughts on this issue I posted on my Blog, just follow the link on my comment name. |
Mark Dexter
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... Barrie, maybe I'm missing something here. When you say an "easy" fix would be "/domain.com/ID-articletitle", how would you control what else shows on the page besides the article? Don't you need to be able to say what modules you want to show and how you want the article to display (title, author, and so on)? This might depend on how you navigated to the article. So I don't see how you can omit this information from the URL. Thanks. |
Compass Design
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... Good point Mark, when I said easy fix, I was referring to the problem of PR dilution. Somehow tracking the menu ID is a challenge. But not addressing it seems to have led to bigger problems. |
SAP GRC
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... I have five websites with almost same content and haven't got any penalty from Google. I think it applies only to dozens websites with same content. |
Compass Design
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... @SAP Correct, there is NO duplicate PENALTY from Google. There IS however, an issue with pagerank DILUTION |
P.J. Swesey
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... sh404SEF does a great job of rerouting these duplicate URLs into a single SEF URL, and allowing you to change or add routes of existing URLs. I'm a little surprised you didn't mention it in this article. From there you just need to make sure you don't have any articles with duplicate article titles or article title aliases. I wrote a couple free administrator modules that will point out any articles with duplicate titles, title aliases or meta descriptions, you can get them at http://joomladigger.com/joomla-extensions/ |
Diseño Ciudad Real
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... And don't forget to disable RSS. This was made to create duplicate content... Really who could be so stupid to make it easy for other sites to create your content in duplicate. |
Paul Mackenzie Ross
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... OK, the heading of this article, "Duplicate Titles in Joomla" was interesting... I run a Joomla 1.0.x site with multi-page articles, or "content items" as Joomla names them. For me the "duplicate titles" issue is that Joomla assigns the same tag to every page in, for example, a 10-page article (content item) and Google Webmaster Tools picks up on that, advising against it and me seeing the ranking drop because the title is not specific to the content of the page, it's just generic and harks back to the days of keyword stuffing. As for duplicate content, well that's a different matter. Using OpenSEF all the URLs are rewritten and the numerous paths converge so there is never any dupe content within the site. As for dupe content from external sites, it's worth getting to the punch first and ensuring Google or any other SE is crawling your site first, thereby accrediting your site as the originator of the content and affecting scraped or mere copied sites first. As an example I started creating content for a site back in September and it's all original, all unique, written by me with little SEO effort and nothing in the way of SEM. An "SEO guy" I know has a bigger site that's got tons of IBLs and his content is grabbed from those "article sites". I've got PR4 and he's got PR2. Is that Google doing a good job of penalising sites with dupe content? I hope so So dupe content in your own site... I was gonna say that PR4/PR5 combined doesn't necessarily equal a boost and expected a PR5 or PR6 if you're lucky, but I just had a squint and it looks like a PR5. Good job. Any improvement in the SERPs for the terms for that page? |
barrienorth
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... Interesting thoughts Paul.. thanks You are quite right, there are actually THREE problems to ponder Duplicate Titles Duplicate Content page Rank Dilution |
fares001
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... ... And don't forget to disable RSS. This was made to create duplicate content... Really who could be so stupid to make it easy for other sites to create your content in duplicate. |
d1rect download
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... All good points Barrie, im glad someone else noticed that the duplicate content is still a problem, just in a different way! |
Internet Marketing IQ
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... It's June 2, 2009 I found your post while searching for a solution to Duplicate Title and Meta Description tags with Joomla. I was made aware of this from the Google Webmaster Admin area. I did some research yesterday and it seems the patches and plugins are a bit cumbersome. Of course I'd like to see a simple paramater box on the Section and Category areas to add a descriptive Title and Description Tag. I mostly do Wordpress Sites now, so I don't dig in very deeply as to what is coming in Version 1.6. I Believe I am using WP 1.5.7 and one of your JoomlaShack Templates. Any update on this? Actually I don't think WordPress if perfect either but I'm finding it more an more suitable as a small CMS, especially with a few link order/category order/post order plug ins. Wish you would consider developing Templates (CMS Specific) for the WordPress Platform as well. By the way for those who have not viewed Matt Cutts Feb 2009 Video on Canonical Link Element it's worth a look. I felt pretty stupid when I realized I have this really bad (almost subconscious) habit of adding a trailing slash / to the end of my website URL when I post. And ... well it's worth a look. Thanks. |
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