Fixing Duplicate Page Content On My Site

[Camrynb]

I am having an issue with duplicate pages being found on my site. I have looked into this a lot. Different pages are doing it for different reasons. Some, like the home page are doing it, due to a www no-www problem. Some are doing it because the pages themselves are too similar. Others, I believe, are doing it because of user ID numbers assigned to the URL when a customer logs in. (The last I am unsure whether I can really fix) 

 

Here is my problem. Like many on here, I am sure, I know very little about coding. Especially PHP. My boss wants to try to accomplish this in house. Yes, I understand that it is much harder than people give credit for and I have gotten multiple quotes from multiple coders trying to sway him to use a person with the knowledge and heck, a person who deserves the money, to do this. As of right now he is set on at least trying to figure this out in house. Even if this means making some mistakes along the way.

 

Now that that is out of the way here are at least some of my questions:

 

- I am working through the /cpanel of the site to look for the pages I need in order to put a canonical or a 301 redirect. (The pages that are just too similar I will be adding unique text and images to to try and help with those duplication issues.) However, I don't know how to find them! For example, let's say I am trying to find the homepage to put the rel=canonical tag into the header. well I know the homepage will be index.php which I have found. However what will be the duplicate pages? Will they just be in a subfolder such as the includes folder (depending on where whoever coded the site decided to put it) There is another index.php in this folder but it is a different file size. And this is the easiest of the pages to find. (at least if I have the index.php part correct)

 

Not only that but when I go into the index.php I find this:

 

/* Tell forum.php to redirect 

to the default url as defined 

in the navigation manager */

define('VB_REDIRECT', true);

 

Doesn't this already mean that duplicate (which was named http://www.killbillet.com/forum.php?s=9b0841ea53f918d77f12ba32487df7ca)

already redirect to the index?? I worry that if I put another redirect or canonical I will do damage. 

 

Some suggestions on locating pages and fixing these issues would be very helpful. Thank you for reading this (if you made it all the way through it)

[kralcx]

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to easily find pages with both duplicate titles and meta descriptions. Get more information here

 

or use a program like Screaming Fog to check your site for duplicate pages