Duplicate Page Titles & Content
-
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome)
We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly.
My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
-
Hi Ladies & Gents
It was a canonical tag error - we went from 6000 errors to 11500 errors and now after the issue was fixed we have a handful of non related errors to sort.
Really appreciate all the feedback.
Kind Regards
Liam
-
how are you getting on, did this get resolved?
-
Hey Peter, I'm just having problems with the 4th example, and I believe you are doing it wrong. Not to try to point out problems with your software, but the report that I now have is more or less unusable for my clients because you see the duplicates this way.
What we have, is duplicates reaching to different categories with canonical set up.
B references A in category 1
D references C in category 2
and hundreds more ...But, because B and D are empty, except for the navigation, the tool sees B and D as duplicates. Two problems with that:
1. They are not even "considered" by Google, because they reference something else as a canonical, so they are not duplicates of each other.
2. The report now shows 10 different pages from different categories as duplicates, and with the number of false identified duplicates it is now impossible for me to find any real duplicates.So, is my understanding wrong, and what can we do to find the really duplicated pages?
Thanks,
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us! I'm sorry if there are any confusions regarding the way we classify duplicate content. Just clarify a few things, 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.For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsI hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thanks for the responses - sort of what I feared but haven't implemented canonical tags before so was unsure whether they should be showing.
Looks like there is a long day ahead
-
I am afraid i don’t know the detailed ins and outs of SEOMozs products, however we have some paginated pages on one of our sites. Our crawl reports are not showing errors for duplicate page titles and they are detailed in the notices section as canonical.
This implies to me that the crawl reports do ignore correctly formatted canonical tags. Perhaps you could download the error list and the list of discovered canonical tags and compare the two to confirm. Alternately try crawling the site with other tools, the one i would recommend is Screaming Frog as this will allow you to filter canonical tags in the reports, and do it for free.
-
Hi,
All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.
For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).
So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.
Hope that helps!
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 Content Error
Hello, the result of renewed content appeared in the scan results in my Shopify Store. But these products are unique. Why am I getting this error? Can anyone please help to explain why? screenshot-analytics.moz.com-2021.10.28-19_53_09.png
Moz Pro | | gokimedia0 -
What Should I Do About Duplicate Title Warning From Category Pages Of Store?
I know a lot of the MOZ warnings can be ignored, however, I'm trying to figure out of this one should be added to that list: my store has urls setup like this for categories: https://www.mysite.com/sweaters https://www.mysite.com/sweaters/page/2 The meta title is "Sweaters" for both pages. Is that bad practice? I don't think I can automatically change the meta title to to Sweaters Page 2 or even want to. or should I do that? Or just ignore these type of warnings?
Moz Pro | | IcarusSEO0 -
Duplicate Content in WordPress Taxonomies & Noindex, Follow
Hello Moz Community, We are seeing duplicate content issues in our Moz report for our WordPress site’s Tag pages. After a bit of research, it appears one of the best solutions is to set Tag pages to “no index, follow” within Yoast. That makes sense, but we have a few questions: In doing this, how are we affecting our opportunity to show up in search results? Are there any other repercussions to making this change? What would it take to make the content on these pages be seen as unique?
Moz Pro | | CoreyHicks1 -
My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?
Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it? This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion. Thank you. | |
Moz Pro | | dlmilli1 -
Forward slash on URL on Duplicate Content Report
Hi I'm new to this whole Moz thing, so needing help from some kind people! I've just looked at my Duplicate Page Content report and there are loads of URLs in there which are the same but are just differentiated by adding / at the end of the URL, e.g. http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events http://youngepilepsy.org.uk/news-and-events/events/ Is this be a canonical issue? I can't understand why though as these aren't at the root. However when we add inline text links within the page HTML, there are some URLs with / and some without, could that be the reason? Thanks for your help! Jackie
Moz Pro | | YoungEpilepsy1 -
Excel tips or tricks for duplicate content madness?
Dearest SEO Friends, I'm working on a site that has over 2,400 instances of duplicate content (yikes!). I'm hoping somebody could offer some excel tips or tricks to managing my SEOMoz crawl diagnostics summary data file in a meaningful way, because right now this spreadsheet is not really helpful. Here's a hypothetical situation to describe why: Say we had three columns of duplicate content. The data is displayed thusly: | Column A | Column B | Column C URL A | URL B | URL C | In a perfect world, this is easy to understand. I want URL A to be the canonical. But unfortunately, the way my spreadsheet is populated, this ends up happening: | Column A | Column B | Column C URL A | URL B | URL C URL B | URL A | URL C URL C | URL A | URL B | Essentially all of these URLs would end up being called a canonical, thus rendering the effect of the tag ineffective. On a site with small errors, this has never been a problem, because I can just spot check my steps. But the site I'm working on has thousands of instances, making it really hard to identify or even scale these patterns accurately. This is particularly problematic as some of these URLs are identified as duplicates 50+ times! So my spreadsheet has well over 100K cells!!! Madness!!! Obviously, I can't go through manually. It would take me years to ensure the accuracy, and I'm assuming that's not really a scalable goal. Here's what I would love, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Does anyone know of a formulaic way that Excel could identify row matches and think - "oh! these are all the same rows of data, just mismatched. I'll kill off duplicate rows, so only one truly unique row of data exists for this particular set" ? Or some other work around that could help me with my duplicate content madness? Much appreciated, you Excel Gurus you!
Moz Pro | | FMLLC0 -
Truncate page URLs
We have some pages (for example a contact us form) for which the URL is modified by the CMS depending on the referring page (this helps to put the form submission in context for the sales reps who get the contact submission). The SEOmoz crawler considers each URL a new page -- and so numbers like in diagnostics are all inflated as the same page is listed multiple times (e.g. for too many links) Is there a setting to change what the crawler considers to be the same page? Here are two URLs for the same page that the reports treat as separate pages: http://www.spirent.com/About-Us/Contact_us.aspx?referurl=0F528F4D703D8BB3523738D6373AA8AD http://www.spirent.com/About-Us/Contact_us.aspx?referurl=10ACDA6055244E369395223437FDCF30 The page is actually: http://www.spirent.com/About-Us/Contact_us.aspx Thanks Ken
Moz Pro | | spirent.marcom0 -
Amount of Pages Crawled Dropped Significantly
I am just wondering if something changed with the SEOMoz crawler. I was always getting 10,000 or near 10,000 pages crawled. After the last two crawls I am ending up around 2500 pages. Has anything changed that I would need to look at it see if I am blocking the crawler or something else?
Moz Pro | | jeffmace0