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
-
Href Lang & Canonical Tags
Hi I have 2 issues appearing on my site audit, for a number of pages. I don't think I actually have an issue but just want to make sure. Using this page as an example - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/0-5-l-capacity-round-safety-can-149p210 The errors I get are: 1. Conflicting hreflang and rel=canonical Canonical page points to a different language URL - when using href & canonicals, it states I need a self referential canonical . The page above is a SKU page, so we include a canonical back to the original model page so we don't get lots of duplicate content issues. Our canonical will point to - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/justrite-round-safety-cans 2. No self referencing hreflang. Are these big issues? I'd think the bigger issue would be if I add self referencing canonicals and end up with lots of duplicate content. Any advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
Hi We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself! Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henya0 -
Duplicated Meta Descriptions on Dynamic Paginated Pages
If the title didn't put you off please read on! 🙂 According to our latest Moz Crawl Report we have circa 700 instances of duplicate Meta Description on pages that are both dynamically created and also paginated, however, I believe that number to be greater! We are unable to manual make changes to these pages (because they are dynamic) and so we need ask our web devs to create a change in how the Meta is created... If I am not making myself clear (and there is a good chance that I'm not!) then here is an example of what I mean; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/ There are 92 pages of cruise deals for this particular operator with the results of each page having the option to sort by 4 categories; Recommended Cruise Price Sail Date Best Value 4 x 92 = 368 instances just for this one operator! The current Meta Desc is; A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents. ...which isn't great I know! The problem is how to make each page (in each category) unique If any of you have incurred anything similar and have any kind of solution or recommendation then please respond - I would be most grateful! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Are ALL duplicate title tags bad??
We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix. A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”! These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me. One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it. Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Canonical tag - but Title and Description are slightly different
I am building a new SEO site with a "Silo" / Themed architecture. I have a travel website selling hotel reservations. I list a hotel page under a city page - example, www.abc.com/Dallas/Hilton.html Then I use that same property under a segment within the city - example www.abc.com/Dallas/Downtown/Hilton.html, so there are two URLs with the same content Both pages are identical, except I want to customize the Title and Description. I want to customize the title and description to build a consistent theme - for example the /Downtown/Hilton page will have the words "Near Downtown" in the Title and Description, while the primary city Hilton page will not. So I have two questions about this. First, is it okay to use a canonical tag if the Title and Description are slightly different? Everything else is identical. If so, will Google crawl and comprehend the unique Title and Description on the "Downtown" silo? I want Google to see that I have several "supporting" pages to my main landing page(s). I want to present to Google 5 supporting pages in each silo that each has a supporting keyword theme. But I'm not sure if Google will consider content of pages that point to a different page using the canonical tag. Please see this supporting example: http://d.pr/i/aQPv Thanks for your insights. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
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