Duplicate content problem?

[niners52]

Launched a new site about a month ago. I am showing a lot of duplicate content. We are an ecommerce site and all of the duplicates are item pages that all have redirects to the same item page on the new site. Is this a bad thing?

[dzine]

Only duplicate content within your own site?

[niners52]

In webmaster tools under duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description. Sorry about that should have been more descriptive to start. They are all from item or category pages.

[realityhack]

Can you tag them all as canonical

[niners52]

Possibly, but do you think it is worth it? We do not have permanent listings. They are only on the site for 6 months max and sometimes much less, all the way down to a few hours. To tag something as canonical would be to run a script on the old site and put in <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/> with the second part being the link to the new site?

[SEOhostingcouk]

In webmaster tools under duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description. Sorry about that should have been more descriptive to start. They are all from item or category pages.

Can you not edit your title tags and meta description so as to make them unique?

[realityhack]

Yes it is worth it. It tells google they are all the same page. Google will see they load that way and not penalize you.

[niners52]

In doing some research into your question I looked in webmaster tools at the duplicates. If I click the original is redirects to the new page, which is what I wanted. Would it be showing the title tag as duplicate because of the redirect? I had to script for the title tags because we have about just under 20k item pages.

[Seooptimizer]

If you are using duplicate content on your website then it will be never rank on search engine. The content should be fresh and unique from others.

[realityhack]

If the page is JUST a simple redirect and returns the correct header Google will know what it is.

[niners52]

On the current site there is no duplicate content, that is why I am wondering if it has something to do with the old site.

That is all the redirect is, very simple and matches up to the item or category page that it was on. There is no duplicate on the site, only the old stuff that might be duplicated.

[gprosoft]

Hi niners52

First tell us, why should redirect to your current website? because you already known about your old website spam through duplicate content after that why do you redirect new one? i think best to develop present website then will be getting good traffic shortly.. thanks

GProsoft

[realityhack]

301 redirects - Webmaster Tools Help

Strait from Matt Cutts

Your old website should be set up with 301 redirects to the new site. Then Google will know that the old URL is no longer correct (and update accordingly) and it will not slap you for duplicate content just because more than one redirect goes to the same new page. The redirect MUST be a valid server side redirect serving a proper 301 header. This shows the search engine that you aren't trying to trick it just moving your content.

[niners52]

The old site does have 301 redirects to the new site, but I am still showing a lot of duplicate content. I am in the webmaster tools now. It is showing over 5k duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. When I look at what pages have the duplicated it shows 2. The first link is the old site with its item number and the second link is the new site with the same item number. I changed all of the titles and descriptions though so they should not actually be a duplicate. Right?

[niners52]

After double checking everything I found out the developer used 302 instead of 301s. I am guessing that is a large part of the problem?