Forum

[easyrider]

For my website I'm using Wordpress with the Affilotheme. I have realised that my home page and my home page article are actually two separate pages:

ie.

http://mysite.com/

and

http://mysite.com/homepagearticle/

are two different pages with identical content on them. This is a problem in that Google is going to only rank one of them well, which will probably be the one I don't need to rank ie.

http://mysite.com/

What can I do about this?

 

[toby101]

@Easy Rider - I don't think there is a way around it.
But you can take the article link

http://mysite.com/homepagearticle/

out of your side bar so that the duplicate article is at least not accessible.

By the way the page you need to rank is

http://mysite.com/

not

http://mysite.com/homepagearticle/

- For SEO purposes your homepage is far more important than any article url.

 

[jmpruitt]

If you are using Platinum SEO or All in One SEO, you need to check the box for Canonical URLs. This way when they find the duplicate page URLs like that, it will automatically redirect to the one that is the primary page (your base url for example. )

You might want to check out this video on canonical links, to better understand it since I'm not great at explaining it myself...
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebma ... m9onOGTgeM

 

[michellerana]

James is right. Using the canonical meta tag will tell search engines the page URL to be indexed, otherwise it will be seen as duplicate content.

 

[easyrider]

Thanks for this information guys. But Toby, why do you say that it is the home page that I want to rank for, rather than the home page article? Since my site is not well known very few people will actually be searching for it in Google (they can still get there though by typing it directly into the browser window). On the other hand the home page article has a major keyword in it that people are actually searching for.

 

[toby101]

@Easy Rider - couple of reasons why it's more important. Firstly it's going to look very unnatural to the Search engines if your article posts have more backlinks than your home page. In the short run it might wash but not long term.

Yup - the home page article has the major kw but you want to rank for that kw on your

http://mysite.com/

rather than

http://mysite.com/major-kw/

Lets say your big kw is "dog training" but your domain name is something like "train dogs well".

No probs -

go into the seo plugin options and enter kw into home title box and the article description into home descrition box etc.

Now your Home page title tag and description tag contain the big kw "dog training" and I presume you'll already have "dog training" in the H1 tag.

Next go to Setting - General in WP and at the very least pop the kw into the tag line box - also if you can find a way to get it into site title instead of tag line box even better

Next you want to strip all anchor text links in your site pointing to http://mysite.com/major-kw/ and have the anchor text "...dog training.." pointing to

http://www.mysite.com/

Now lets say you have some articles on your site like:
labrador dog training
puppy dog training
pit bull dog training
training dogs to stop barking etc.

Because you are now ranking for "dog training" on your home page all these additional "dog training" articles are going to be sent serious link juice from your homepage - you won't have to do as much backlinking to the articles :)

Also it will be perfectly clear to the search engines and visitors what your site is about.

 

[jmpruitt]

I agree with Toby on this one. If the article is targeting that big keyword, then you want to optimize your homepage for that keyword. You can always rank that page for both the keyword and the domain name anyway.

Also, remember, you don't have any authority right now, but over time hopefully your site will build authority.
For example, my own company name IMRelations got 800 searches last month in Google. that means people are searching for me, because that is not a keyword except for people looking up my company.

It has taken me 3 years of marketing to build up my reputation, but people are starting to look for me. It takes time to brand yourself as an authority but it can happen if you work on it.

People never searched for Google, Facebook, or Twitter until they became brand names that people want to know more about. now they are common household names.

 

[easyrider]

My website is constantly in and out of the Google rankings now. I have had some success ranking in the top 10 for one of my most important keyword, but only a few days later I have totally disappeared out of Google again. Since I haven't done anything intentionally against Google guidelines, I have a theory that this home page duplication problem could be the issue. What I am thinking on doing is instead of using the canonical meta tag approach, just doing a 301 redirect of the homepage article to the homepage. Is there a simple way to do this on Wordpress without having to use programming code?

 

[Cecille L]

Hi Greg,

Could you further explain this:

doing a 301 redirect of the homepage article to the homepage

Do you mean that you set one of your articles as homepage?

A 301 redirect means "moved permanently". This means the current indexed page has already moved 'permanently' to a new URL. We have a lesson on how to move your pages with 301 redirect. You can apply the methods shown in the lesson to your website, but there may be other, better options. For one, you can have all your latest posts shown i the homepage and add a More tag (Continue link) after the first paragraph of each article. This way the entire article will not be visible in the homepage.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!

 

[michellerana]

You could use KB robots.txt plugin to prevent one of the pages from being indexed by Google. Install "KB-ROBOTS.TXT" plugin. Then list all the pages you want removed like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

http://mysite.com/homepagearticle/

Disallow:

http://mysite.com/homepagearticle2/

Hope that helps!

 

[lizatailor23]

Be careful not to change the search path for the search page though otherwise search queries break with slashes and ampersands.

 

[easyrider]

I still haven't got this issue sorted. There must be some way to resolve this issue - I have seen other Affilorama people who look like they're using the Affilotheme, who seem to have a non-duplicated homepage.

When I looked at James Pruitt's self-esteem site the other day it had a Home tab at the top and when you clicked on another tab and then came back it reverted back to the home page. However, he seems to have changed the theme since I looked at the site then.

The reason I bring this up now is because I have created a new site that is going to be very small, but target a couple of very difficult (and I believe profitable) keywords to rank for. I can't afford to have any duplication problem and I want my site to look professional at the same time.

What would happen if I installed the Redirection plugin and tried to 301 redirect the home page article to the home page - would this work or might it screw things up?

Alternatively are there are any good free themes which I can use, which will solve this problem and not make my site look like a blog. I hate the blog look. Come to think of it, I'm not too keen on blogs in general.

Finally, I sincerely hope this homepage article duplication problem is solved in the new Affilotheme. Hint, hint!!!

 

[Cecille L]

Hi Greg,

I'm sorry to hear this particular issue was left unresolved until now. I have replied to the email you sent. Your current article was set as homepage in Affilotheme > Whole Page > Choose a Home page. I deselected it. You are still saying the same article on the home page because I set in Settings > Reading for your homepage to display the current posts.

I appreciate your patience. Please let me know how you get on.

All the best!