Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content
-
I've been a Pro Member for nearly a year and I am bound and determined to finally clean up all the crawl errors on our site PracticeRange.com.
We have 180 errors for Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content. I fixed many of the pages that were product pages with duplicate content. Those product descriptions were edited and now have unique content.
However, there remain plenty of the errors that are puzzling. Many of the errors reference the same pages, for example, the Home Page, Login Page and the Search page (our catalog pages).
In the case of the Catalog Page errors, these type pages would have the same title every time "Search" and the results differ according to category.http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=6
http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=15If this is rel=canonical issue, how do I fix it on a search result page? I want each of the different category type pages to be indexed. One of them is no more important than the other. So how would I incorporate the rel=canonical?
In the case of the Home Page errors, I'm really confused. I don't know where to start to fix these. They are the result of a 404 error that leads to the home page. Is the content of the 404 page the culprit since it contains a link to the home page?
Here are examples of the Home Page type of crawl errors.
Thanks ,
-
Thanks Dan,
I appended the asterisk. I also tested the robots.txt in google webmaster tools. It alerted me of the required : colon after the disallow statement. I missed that somehow.
The next crawl should finally ignore those search catalog pages.
Best Regards,
Alan
-
Hi Alan,
It seems like you are only targeting the search page, I would suggest adding a * at the end to capture all variations.
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
Latest SEOMOZ crawl still reports 108 Duplicate Page Titles. Almost all of them are from the Search page.
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=5
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=50
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=51
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=52
etc.....
I added Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx but it still picked it up during the crawl. Here is the robots.txt.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /Admin/
Disallow: /App_Themes/
Disallow: /Assets/
Disallow: /Checkout/
Disallow: /ClientApi/
Disallow: /ConLib/
Disallow: /FCKeditor/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /Install/
Disallow: /Layouts/
Disallow: /Members/
Disallow: /webcharts/
Disallow: /Basket.aspx
Disallow: /BuyProduct.ashx
Disallow: /*.axd$
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspxSitemap: <http: www.practicerange.com="" sitemap.xml="">Sitemap: http://www.practicerange.com/sitemap.xml</http:>
Am I missing something on the syntax to get the crawl to ignore our Search Pages?
Best Regards,
Alan
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | -
Hi Alan,
Have a look in google webmasters to see if the same 404's are occuring there. If so, they typically give you a list of page that generate the error page. It would be best to eliminate these issues at the source first as they will be offering a poor user experience.
As a prevented measure you could run these pages as a disallow, yes. But I fear that this will make it more difficult to detect these issues in future.
Dan
-
Thanks Dan,
Got it. The catalog pages are not beneficial and the duplication could be hurting.
So I added the disallow statement for the Search pages. We will see if it fixes the problem on our next crawl and change syntax as needed.
Would a similar disallow for the 404.aspx would solve the Home Page 404 crawl errors? Something like...
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?*
Best Regards,
Alan Wills
-
Hi Alan,
This is a two part question. For the search results I would add
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=*
To your robots.txt file. I would probably increase to the entirety of search (by removing the ?m= from the line above), but as I don't completely comprehend how your search section works start with the above. It very rare that search pages offer new content, generally they dilute other pages by duplication.
With your second issue I imagine there are clues in the aspxerrorpath variable. Although I couldn't get any combination of this string to render the below url didn't return to the 404 page like the rest did. Its the tilda (~) in the error string that I think offers the biggest clue.
http://www.practicerange.com/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/
Hope this helps,
Dan
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
-
Duplicate Titles - Recruitment Agency
Hi All, I was just wondering if anyone had come across this problem before - We are a recruitment agency so we have multiple of the same jobs at the same time, so we're looking into ways to differentiate and change it but we've got the same Duplicate Titles - has anyone faced this problem before? And if so what did they do? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmc0 -
Photo Gallery with Duplicate Content and Titles
I have a photo Gallery that is coming up as a lot of Duplicate Titles and Page Content and fixing each photo just isn't possible right now. Should I just block the search engines from indexing them to resolve the errors?
On-Page Optimization | | NeilBelliveau0 -
Wordpress duplicate titles - can't find original title tags
I added new code to rewrite the page titles <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> But I can't find the normal title tags in the Header PHP file in editor so I now have duplicate titles tags in the source code This is the code - can't see what else would be titles? This is the website ... http://apexgenerators.co.uk/ <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> eFavIcon(); ?> eCSS(); ?> enabled('Theme')) { ?> http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Sans:400,700,400italic,700italic" />
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Duplicating content on multiple domains
Hey guys, I've started working with a new client recently called Resource Investing News. I'm more a Social Media person, though I do have SEO experience. RIN has about 40 URLs all of which have original news content published on them. One SEO-related issue that I can see here though is that the primary domain re-publishes all of the original content that the other URLs do. In other words: resourceinvestingnews.com will have an article on it that is also published on goldinvestingnews.com with the same date stamp and a link out to the original article. E.g. http://resourceinvestingnews.com/42539-molybdenum-goes-far-beyond-steelmaking.html http://molyinvestingnews.com/5301-molybdenum-steelmaking-vehicle-demand-electronics-lubricant.html Does anyone have an idea if this is something that should be reviewed and/or whether the content is being negatively affected in search? Many thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | blahblahblah20150 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content (index.htm)
I get an error of "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Content" for the following pages in the SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics. But these pages are the same one! Duhhhh.... Is there a way to hide this false error? http://www.stdtime.com/ http://www.stdtime.com/index.htm BTW, I also get "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Title" for this page. Another false error...
On-Page Optimization | | raywhite0 -
Dupelicate content home page and custom page question
I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
Duplicate Content for Spanish & English Product
Hi There, Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English. As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course. For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers. So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that. The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products. My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it. Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me? If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom0 -
Duplicate Content
What I can do to avoid the duplicate content on the index and in the categorys, I cant block my categorys, cause are pages with big autorithy, so what i can do ?
On-Page Optimization | | nafera20