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
-
Local SEO: Spain - having trouble getting to first page
Dear, Moz community We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es . **My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. ** The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
Geo Domains & SEO Issues
Hi Is there issues to duplicate content on geo specific domains. For example we have a client with a .co.uk site who wants to create a .ie website for the local market, rather than sending them to the UK site. The content would be duplicated with limited customization. What issues would you for-see and how could they be overcome? Thank you
Technical SEO | | RadicalMedia0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
My Article Post Title in both the h1 and the h2 are the same. Is this good seo?
I'm seeing a common practice in wordpress themes where the h1 tag for a page has the logo in it, then the h2 would be the title to the article. I've decided to place the title in the h1 dynamically, like this: - Joe's Auto Store where '' is the actual title to the post - the logo is still being used as a background image in the h1... So for example, the page would show this: How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store I think this is good seo still, but the other issue is that the first, subsequent also has the exact same title because this is the actual post title, which uses the first h2 on the page to display the title. So the code would look like this: - My Company paragraph content text stuff an example would be How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store How install a car battery At Joe's we teach how to install batteries on site. There are mor...(etc.) Is this an issue since the post title in both the h1 and h2 are nearly the same (except for the company name)? Is this good seo still?
Technical SEO | | johnnydigital0 -
Fixing Duplicate Pages Titles/Content
I have a DNN site, which I created friendly URL's for; however, the creation of the friendly URL's then created duplicate page content and titles. I was able to fix all but two URL's with rel="canonical" links. BUT The two that are giving me the most issues are pointing to my homepage. When I added the rel = "canonical" link the page then becomes not indexable. And for whatever reason, I can't add a 301 redirect to the homepage because it then gives me "can't display webpage" error message. I am new to SEO and to DNN, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | VeronicaCFowler0 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Can duplicate [*] reports be suppressed?
That's the best question could come up with! Have searched but can't find any info. New user: First crawl error report show listings of pages with same titles/descriptions. In reality they are all the same page but with different parameters eg Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp?productId=xxxxxxxxx etc These have been excluded in both robots.txt (for some time ie disallow: /*?)and google webmaster tools (just done). Will they still show in updated report and if so is there a way to suppress them if the issues have been rectified as can be done in webmaster tools. Is there a way to test to see if they are being excluded by robots.txt and GWT?
Technical SEO | | RobWillox0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0