SEO Mox reporting all pages & titles as duplicate, but this is not the case.
-
HI, I am confused . This week SEOMoz is reporting that all my pages and pages titles are duplicate. This is not the case. I have added geo meta tags to each page - could this be causing the duplicate page content condition? I have no theory about the title duplicate condition. I have uploaded pdfs of these seomoz reports here: http://www.2shared.com/document/JAgS2Ni9/Issue_-Duplicate_Page_Content.html http://www.2shared.com/document/gyXcMsoP/Issue-Duplicate_Page_Title-.html Help please. thanks.
-
Rel canonical is definitely NOT the preferred way to handle this kind of situation, IMO, Zach. Best practice is to run the 301 redirect to give the Search Engines (and users!) the clearest message as to the Fully Qualified Domain.
This isn't a matter of the 2 URLs needing to exist, which is when you use rel canonical. The second variation serves no possible useful purpose, so should be redirected in order to get rid of it altogether.( In my experience, rel canonical also doesn't seem to reliably pass page influence the way 301s do.)
For example, by doing the redirect, the URL will always appear in the address bar as the www version, so if someone copies that address, they'll always end up using the canonical FQDN.
That said, Richard, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the Search Engines that you want your www version to be considered canonical. It's just one more way of signalling to them.
Once this is working, you're going to want to be very careful to always use the FQDN yuorself - ie always write links using the full www.weddingdancelessons.co.uk, whether on your own site or when you're getting links back to yourself.
-
That new rule won't catch all the related subpages, Richard.
Here's the standard version I use - give it a shot, then test it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au$1 [R=301,L]Paul
-
yes thanks.
I already had:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/" [R=301,L]in my .htaccess file but these errors as per the ref you provided. So I am not sure if this is working.
Would
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
solve the problem ?
-
I think you should continue looking at doing a 301 redirect instead.
You can use the canonical tag, but you should do so in cases where you intend to have different URLs for one main page (e.g. www.example.com/blue-widget.html, www.example.com/widgets/blue-widget.html). Here is a another question regarding canonicals where Ryan Kent provides a good explanation for this.
You can learn more about 301 redirecting here. Yoast also provides some information for how to do it here.
-
Thanks Paul,
so would this be the correct syntax in line 1 of .htacess file?
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
Thanks.
-
We literally just wrote on the same error I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.
-
Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach
-
As near as I can tell, Richard, the crawl is reporting the issue because you don't have canonicalization of the primary domain of the website. Big words to mean that your site is resolving at both www.weddingdancelessons.com.au and weddingdancelessons.com.au (without the www)
Search Engines and therefore Mozbot will see these as two different sets of pagesx, therefore duplicating each other.
If you look down the list of pages reported, you'll see that some are listed with the www and some without.
What should happen is that one of those two versions is 301-redirected to the other. Best practice is usually to redirect the non-www to the www version, although it can be worth double-checking which version has more incoming links/page authority before making the final choice.
Since this looks like it's just happened, it may be that there have been changes made to the .htaccess file that have messed up previous settings, or it may be that the crawler just caught the dupes this time.
Paul
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
-
Pages with duplicate meta descriptions
We have around 17 pages have underscores in the URL. From the 17 pages, we have changed 3 pages URL for example if the url is test_sample_demo.html, we have changed as test-sample-demo.html After the updates, we have made redirect as follows Redirect 301 test_sample_demo.html test-sample-demo.html Presently google webmaster tool shows as "Pages with duplicate meta descriptions" & "Pages with duplicate title tags" for changed pages How to fix this. Please help us
Technical SEO | | Intellect0 -
Drupal SEO help - Duplicate content but very similar URLS?
Hi, This is a very strange problem and not sure how it has happened. I am adding packages to my website and a duplicate page & almost identical URL is being picked up by Google. E.g. the page I make is http://www.ukgirlthing.co.uk/hen-party/bristol-spa-rty-lunch-pampering-h... but then also appearing is http://www.ukgirlthing.co.uk/hen-party/bristol-spa-rty-pampering-hen-party. The node's are exactly the same, and if i edit one of them, the other also updates. You will notice that the URL's are almost exactly the same, except the words are re-organised slightly? Shall i just delete the URL alias of the duplicate entry or is there something else which is making this happen? These URL's are being picked up as duplicate content, although it's the same node! Hope you can help, Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Party_Experts0 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
We have duplicate page titles on the footer menu section of our site. Is this considered spammy?
When our new site was in development stages our digital agency convinced me that we should have duplicate menu links in the footer section of the site. The general justification being that the menu links are key word relevant. I have received opposing opinion from SEO advisers indicating that these duplicate menu links could be considered 'spammy'. I would appreciate some views on this please
Technical SEO | | saints0 -
Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?
The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it? How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text? Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept? faq.html
Technical SEO | | RKanfi0 -
Duplicated content on subcategory pages: how do I fix it?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
I manage an e-commerce website and we have a duplicated content issue for subcategory. The scenario is like this: /category1/subcategory1
/category2/subcategory1
/category3/subcategory1 A single subcategory can fit multiple categories, so we have 3 different URL for the same subcategory with the same content (except of the navigation link). Which are the best practice to avoid this issue? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate Version of Home Page Causing Problems?
Hello, I have a .php based site and i'm curious if how we split traffic is negatively affecting our rankings. Currently, if you visit Lipozene.com you are split 50/50 between two pages, indexa.php and indexb.php. These have identical content right now, and i'm curious if this has negatively affected our rankings. We've dropped off the SERPs for our brand term "lipozene" even though we are the official site and own www.lipozene.com . Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | lipoweb0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0