Why does SEOmoz bot see duplicate pages despite I am using the canonical tag?
-
Hello here,
today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html
Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate?
Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!
-
Thank you Peter, I got your ticket reply.
That makes perfect sense, and as Dr. Peter pointed out on a different thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-seomoz-bot-consider-these-as-duplicate-pages
I was discussing this issue further, I was confused by your report.
Thank you again for your help and I hope you will improve your report interface to avoid such confusion related issues in the future.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us, I replied to you in a support ticket, but I just wanted to share it everyone since I think it might be relevant to this discussion.
I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing, you can see the duplicate pages by clicking on the number to the right side of the link. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3(Duplicate 1) is considered a duplicate of
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=mp3 (Duplicate 2)because the canonical tag for the first page is CANON1(http://screencast.com/t/tqvDZrLsyz8D) while the canonical for the second URL is CANON2 (http://screencast.com/t/FOguPJmK0).
Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that CANON1 and CANON2 are likely to be duplicates themselves.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.Hope that helps,
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thinking furthermore, I don't see how these pages can be considered nearly duplicate since their content is quite different:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
Thoughts??!!
-
Nobody can tell me why SEOmoz ignore my canonical tag definitions? According to some comments on the following thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages
It should actually ignore pages with a canonical tag and NOT mark them as duplicate, but in my experience (as explained above), that's not been the case.
-
Ok, thank you, now I get the point... then here is my next question: is there a way to tell SEOmoz bot to ignore duplicate page with a defined canonical tag? If not, the SEOmoz duplicate page report is useless for me. I am not interested to know about duplicate page for which I have already defined a canonical tag for.
Thanks!
-
Canonical lets you pick which of the duplicates will be indexed. But Google still has to crawl the other pages when they could be crawling other parts of your site. It's an opportunity cost. If you can accept slower crawls, you can ignore the issue.
-
I am sorry, but I don't understand your point. If two pages are similar, we can use the canonical tag to "consolidate" them and avoid duplicate issues. Am I right? Or what are canonical tags for?
-
While I agree that SEOMOZ should better categorize duplicates that are canonical, the reason they still tell you it's duplicate is crawl budget. Remember, Google still has to crawl these duplicate pages and they could be crawling something else instead. Canonical only helps by letting you pick which duplicate content gets indexed. It's better to not have duplicate content than to have canonical duplicates.
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
-
This one is complicated... canonicals, href lang tags and no index
Bear with me, this is complicated (I REALLY hope one of you comes along and says, no it isn't!) Scenario A client has multiple english pages, as they have a unique product offering in AUS, US, UK, NZ and also have a global site in english. Obviously there is a lot of duplicate content and they have the relevant href lang tags set-up to help Google untangle what should be ranked where. They also have rel-canonical on each page. I've set-up search console for each of the folder structures, i.e. en-us, en-gb, en-au and so on. They have an optimised page for one of their primary keywords, which ranks nowhere for this exact keyword, but this page DOES rank for 40 similar keywords. For the exact keyword, they rank 52nd, and frustratingly, it's the homepage that ranks. We know the correct page is ranking and is indexed because search console tells us so and we see the exact page appear in SERPs for the other 40 keywords. When I look at the en-us site in Search Console, it tells me that the home page is not being indexed, because a rel canonical tag is prioritising an alternative page (probably the global site) - however, the en-us homepage is showing up in rankings for a lot of their important keywords. The site has been live for 6 months and the optimised page for about 3 months. Questions 1. If search console is saying the homepage is not ranking, how is it showing up in SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Algorhythm_jT
2. Why is the homepage ranking for this important keyword, when there is virtually no mention of the keyword versus the page that is almost perfect according to Moz's on-page grader?
3. Do you need href lang tags AND rel canonical on a page?
4. How long before a new page that is optimised for a keyword take to replace (and hopefully surpass) the homepage?
5. If the US is the most important market, should we guide Google to that fact using rel-canonical? Really appreciate your feedback, hivemind. Thanks0 -
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Solution to Duplicate Pages within Shopify
Thanks in advance for your time and expertise. I am having issues with duplicate page content and titles on a client's Shopify subdomain. Examples below. Two questions: #1 How can I solve this issue? Do I block the duplicate pages from being crawled? With meta NoIndex? Establish the main page as the canonical version and stop obsessing? Other... #2 Is it a big concern or am I needlessly obsessing? Feels like a concern that needs to be addressed, but maybe not? Duplicate Page Content Examples: #1 URL: http://shop.shopvandevort.com #1 Duplicate URLs: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/all; http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/all?page=1 #2 URL: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/accessories #2 Duplicate URLs: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/accessories; http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/types?q=Accessories Duplicate Page Title Examples: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/vendors?q=For%20Love%20And%20Lemons http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/for-love-lemons http://shopvandevort.com/blog/tag/for-love-and-lemons/ http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/for-love-lemons?page=1 Thanks again for taking a look here, very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHurst0 -
Canonical URL on search result pages
Hi there, Our company sells educational videos to Nurses via subscription. I've been looking at their video search results page:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd When you click on a category, the URL appears like this:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications Would this be an instance where i'd use the canonical tag to redirect each search results page? Bearing in mind the /cpd page is under /Nursing cpd, and that /Nursing cpd is our best performing page in search engines, would it be better to refer it to the 'Nursing CPD' rather than 'CPD' page? Any advice is very welcome,
Thanks,
John0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0