SEOmoz suddenly reporting duplicate content with no changes???
-
I am told the crawler has been updated and wanted to know if anyone else is seeing the same thing I am.
SEOmoz reports show many months of no duplicate content problems. As of last week though, I get a little over a thousand pages reported as dupe content errors.
Checking these pages I find there is similar content (hasn't changed) with keywords that are definitely different. Many of these pages rank well in Google, but SEOmoz is calling them out as duplicate content. Is SEOmoz attempting to closely imitate Google's perspective in this matter and therefore telling me that I need to seriously change the similar content?
Anyone else seeing something like this?
-
Hi
We see the extreme raise in the duplicate content of our site too. If the sensitivity is adapted, will these graphs come down again?
What is your opinion on how Google sees a webshop with lot's of products and filter options? Our site www.dmlights.com/massive for example can have a lot of filtering but we try to counter this in Webmaster Tools with the URL parameters.
Do you suggest to adapt this for good seo?
Wondering about your opinions. Thanks.
-
Hey Scott,
Again, we're sorry about the odd jump in duplicate content errors!
We just launched a new crawler and it is being extremely sensitive to duplicate content. As of now we are picking up duplicate pages on your domain via:
https clones of URLs
Some pages have a “/” trailing after the URL and some don’t
We are also ignoring some rel=canonical directives
This is an issue that other users are seeing with their crawls. Our engineers have made some changes to the crawler to scale back the sensitivity to these issues on the crawler and you should be seeing the changes within a week or two.
We're really sorry for the confusion.
Best of Luck,
Chiaryn
-
Two good suggestions so far, and both I had checked. Thanks KJ Rogers and Ryan Kent.
This is starting to look like it boils down to how much the new SEOmoz crawler sees content in the same way that Google does.
We did not make any site-wide changes and the URLs identified as duplicate in the report are valid URLs that actually hold similar content (keywords and so forth were changed for each version of a slightly different product through an Excel Concatenate construct to build the content). We have actually seen these pages climb in rank over the months since the content was added.
So, like I said, the sudden identification of these as duplicate by the moz crawler is suspicious to me. Not sure it sees things the way Google does.
-
Without examining your site and the pages involved it is not possible for me to share feedback.
Is it possible you made any recent site wide changes? Changes to your header, navigation, footer or sidebar could have pushed you passed a certain threshhold of duplicate content which triggered a flag.
-
I got the same thing last week. I later found out that mine, using dynamic content on the same page, had speical characters in the url which was taking crawlers to an error page. The error page was showing a list of pages with the url's capitalized. I was able to fix some of them, but it scared the heck out of me.
I had to run a crawl test from SEOMoz to filter out what was going on. Perhaps you have something similar?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I'm Pulling Hairs! - Duplicate Content Issue on 3 Sites
Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
ATTN SEO MINDS: Is there a way/tool to categorize keywords from an Omniture/GA report?
So ideally I would like to take the list of keywords I am currently ranking for, and group these based on what the user intent was in making that query. For example if I am a Thai delivery chain and I am currently receiving traffic from the queries "vegan dish" and "tofu thai food", I would want to have a column in a keyword report that says these queries fall into the VEGETARIAN category. I think what I want to know is how can I filter a massive list by a range of keywords? I want to know does this cell contain, "keyword A" or "keyword B" or "keyword Z". If so list the corresponding category. This way I can look at keyword performance by category or user intent/motivation. Is there a tool out there that will help me accomplish this, or is there a good solution in excel I can use?
Algorithm Updates | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Drop in Traffic from Google, However no change in the rankings
I have seen a 20% drop in traffic from google last week (After April 29th). However when I try to analyze the rank of the keywords in the google results that send me traffic they seem to be the same. Today (6th March) Traffic has fallen further again with not much/any visible change in the rankings. Any ideas on what the reason for this could be? I have not made any changes to the website recently.
Algorithm Updates | | raghavkapur0 -
Any PR Lose? Google Made a Update ! Heavy Traffic, Followed SEOmoz Tips - Dropped to PR4 ?
I followed the rules to minimize the links in the page. Getting Same Traffic to my blog and increased only. But my PR5 to PR4 ? why even 404 Error was reduced o 5 or 6 which i updated now ! not accepting any Text Link ads ! too past 6 months also !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Why is there no compiled list of the different types of search results on Google, and what the content qualifications are to generate those results?
Seems to me that this list should exist out there somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. Am I just not as good of a Googler as I thought I was?
Algorithm Updates | | Draftfcb0 -
Need help with some duplicate content.
I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was. It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this: http://noahsdad.com/resources/ http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/ http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/ I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category. What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed." There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories. Any ideas what I should do? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Changes in Sitemap Indexation in GWT?
I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation. Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week? Thanks, Joe
Algorithm Updates | | JoeAmadon0 -
Changing Wordpress Permalink Structure, 301s, and Possibility of Rank Loss?
I have to change the permalink structure in wordpress, as using /%postname%/ in conjunction with a couple thousand pages triggers verbose rewrite rules, which further triggers about 5,000 requests per page load. The permalink structure must change as wordpress development probably won't change this in the near future. Now, changing the permalink structure worries me quite a bit, as about 25% of my traffic is attributed to my blog posts -- the rest is covered through CMS-like-use of pages (75%). blog posts will change permalink/url structure, pages won't The website is very respected in my niche and has quite a few links going to most of my posts and pages, as well as the homepage I've noticed in the last year that anything I post starts ranking on page 1 of Google for very competitive kws in 1-3 days, often with top 3 rankings PR4 / decent Alexa / Moz ranks not too shabby either / quality content / decent social media linking (mainly Facebook) / no penalties I provided the factors as to not gloat, but rather to get the best answer from those who have fairly established websites and perhaps had to change their URLs and noticed some or no changes to their rankings. How long of a hit am I going to take / how much my posts might drop down in SERPs if I change the permalink structure, properly 301 them, and implement all changes in one swoop? Info for WordPress users Benefits of changing the permalink structure to /%post_id%/%postname%/ -- for example -- include: way faster load times, not having 5,000 requests per page load, avoiding verbose rewrite rules trigger, finally modify the site without worrying about crashing the website and using a local server to make changes on thousands of pages (the database backups, the ritual of changing the settings in the local database, changing the post/page, saving the local database, loading the locally saved db on live server, and crossing fingers and pray it works -- just takes so darn long.) Ahh..yes, huge time saver. ** this issue occurs when using WP as a CMS with several hundred pages + and using the /%postname%/ or /%category%//%postname%/ or /somethingstatic/%postname%/ -- IF USING the date based way /%year%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%/%postname%/ you should be fine.
Algorithm Updates | | pepsimoz0