Moz crawl duplicate pages issues
-
Hi
According to the moz crawl on my website I have in the region of 800 pages which are considered internal duplicates. I'm a little puzzled by this, even more so as some of the pages it lists as being duplicate of another are not.
For example, the moz crawler considers page B to be a duplicate of page A in the urls below: Not sure on the live link policy so ive put a space in the urls to 'unlive' them.
Page A http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/jeans/straight-jeans.html?manufacturer=3751
Page B http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/catalog/category/view/s/accessories/id/92/?cat=97&manufacturer=3603
One is a filter page for Curvety Jeans and the other a filter page for Charles Clinkard Accessories. The page titles are different, the page content is different so Ive no idea why these would be considered duplicate. Thin maybe, but not duplicate.
Like wise, pages B and C are considered a duplicate of page A in the following
Page A http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/bags.html?dir=desc&manufacturer=4050&order=price
Page B http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/catalog/category/view/s/purses/id/98/?manufacturer=4001
Page C http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/coats/waistcoats.html?manufacturer=4053
Again, these are product filter pages which the crawler would have found using the site filtering system, but, again, I cannot find what makes pages B and C a duplicate of A.
Page A is a filtered result for Great Plains Bags (filtered from the general bags collection). Page B is the filtered results for Chic Look Purses from the Purses section and Page C is the filtered results for Apricot Waistcoats from the Waistcoat section.
I'm keen to fix the duplicate content errors on the site before it goes properly live at the end of this month - that's why anyone kind enough to check the links will see a few design issues with the site - however in order to fix the problem I first need to work out what it is and I can't in this case.
Can anyone else see how these pages could be considered a duplicate of each other please? Checking ive not gone mad!!
Thanks,
Carl
-
These days, content is king. It looks like there are a lot of similar internal links in the source code of these pages. When you have thin/or no content, your internal link profile stands out a lot more.
What helped me overcome this for my company is focusing on aggregating customer reviews and having my customer service team generate unique product descriptions. Social media was great for reviews. We offered small coupons at first, and now our customers want to send reviews. Unique product descriptions might be tough for clothes, but, it isn't impossible.
Having a ridiculously duplicated internal link profile and no content is almost as detrimental to your organic rankings as a spammy external linking profile. You want to look like an eCommerce site and not an online catalog.
-
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the response. I tested the canonical side of things but was finding that it was stopping the filtered pages being indexed. While we could get 'Dresses' page indexed we couldn't get 'Black Dresses' 'X retailer brand Dresses' etc indexed. We found this a bit of an issue. On the filtering page the tag always pointed back to the category root.
We are using an seo plugin for Magento so maybe i will need to go back to the dev and ask them. I accept that not putting canonical tag on the filtering could lead to internal duplicate content issues if a product can be found a dresses, red dresses, x brand dresses, x brand red dresses and via price.
Even though the side is still a work in progress we are already seeing the filtered pages getting indexed and ranking fairly well. So, for example (I don't think we rank for this one) we are ranking for term such as Black Size 12 Evening Dress. Sure, this term won't get millions of searches but long tail converts very well. As much as I would love to be no1 for Dresses we are not going to get there for a long long time. Especially given the No1 brand for the term is DA 86 and has hundreds of thousands of links and over 2.1m G+ shares.
We are in a tricky position with the website. Normally we could rank for the filtered terms by product page easy enough, however with all the product pages being pulled externally we need to find an alternative.
-
Hello Carl!
So I checked out the pages you listed and I've had similar issues on my e-Commerce stores. There isn't much text on e-Commerce site pages and there tends to be a ton of links so that always causes a problem for me. E-commerce stores and duplicate content go hand in hand, unfortunately.
I would suggest starting with adding canonical tags into your meta data. There's a few settings in Magento you can turn on and that should take care of some of the problem. Here's a good resource http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/canonical-meta-tag
From there you might want to consider making your meta descriptions on the products a bit more unique. Changing out one word (the product name) doesn't make it different or a non-duplicate. When the content is super thin, it's harder to make the pages, titles, and descriptions unique to search engines. With e-Commerce product pages, I understand the trouble with having text on filter pages…it's just not practical and doesn't look right. But it's important to optimize where you can…the meta descriptions. Here's another resource for that http://moz.com/ugc/our-forgotten-friend-the-meta-description
Hope that helps!
-
Might be worth me adding that I'm aware that all the product pages are duplicate content from other websites. The shop section of the website is an affiliate store. However, all the product pages are set as noindex to the search engines as a result of this. The internal link between the category pages and the product pages will be made nofollow in the coming days. If the engines cannot index the individual products then little point wasting bandwidth on them crawling 200,000 products!
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
-
Moz Pro
Anyone felt that moz pro isn't accurate like in search volume of products and links data that its slow in it?
Moz Pro | | apcreativity0 -
Is The Number of Duplicate Pages reduced after adding canonical ref to the dupe versions ?
Hi Is the number of duplicate pages reported in a dupe page content error report reduced on subsequent crawls, if you have resolved the dupe content problem via adding the canonical tag to duplicate versions (referring the original page). Like it would if you were solving the problem via a 301 redirect (i think/presume) ? Cheers Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Titles Shown in Moz Analytics
Hello, My Moz analytics show over 50 duplicate titles. This because my website title is shown on each page (eg About us | Social Engagement, Contact us | Social Engagement, etc.) Is this really an error to be fixed, that otherwise will impact rankings? Or can I leave it as it is? I don't mind having my website title on each page, but if its worth removing it due to duplicate issues impacting ranking, I will remove 🙂 In this case, does someone have any suggestion on how to do this? Which files should I modify? (Im using Wordpress CMS, and I dont see each page code) Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | socialengaged
Regards, Eugenio | Social Engagement (http://socialengagement.it)0 -
How to find page with the link that returns a 404 error indicated in my crawl diagnostics?
Hi Newbie here - I am trying to understand what to do, step by step, after getting my initial reports back from seomoz. The first is regarding the 404 errors shown as high priority to fix, in crawl diagnostics. I reviewed the support info help on the crawl diagnostics page referring to 404 errors, but still did not understand exactly what I am supposed to do...same with the Q&A section when I searched how to fix 404 errors. I just could not understand exactly what anyone was talking about in relation to my 404 issues. It seems I would want to find the page that had the bad link that sent a visitor to a page not found, and then correct the problem by removing the link, or correcting and re-uploading the page being linked to. I saw some suggestions that seemed to indicate that seomoz itself will not let me find the page where the bad link is and that I would need to use some external program to do this. I would think that if seomoz found the bad page, it would also tell me what page the link(s) to the bad page exists on. A number of suggestions were to use a 301 redirect somehow as the solution, but was not clear when to do this versus, just removing the bad link, or repairing the page the link was pointing to. I think therefore my question is how do I find the links that lead to 404 page not founds, and fix the problem. Thanks Galen
Moz Pro | | Tetruss0 -
I want to create a report of only de duplicate content pages as a csv file so i can create a script to canonicalize them.
I want to create a report of only de duplicate content pages as a csv file so i can create a script to canonicalize them. So i get something like: http://example.com/page1, http://example.com/page2, http://example.com/page3, http://example.com/page4, Because I now have to open each in "Issue: Duplicate Page Content", and this takes a lot of time. The same for duplicate page title.
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim0 -
Crawl reports urls with duplicate content but its not the case
Hi guys!
Moz Pro | | MakMour
Some hours ago I received my crawl report. I noticed several records with urls with duplicate content so I went to open those urls one by one.
Not one of those urls were really with duplicate content but I have a concern because website is about product showcase and many articles are just images with href behind them. Many of those articles are using the same images so maybe thats why the seomoz crawler duplicate content flag is raised. I wonder if Google has problem with that too. See for yourself how it looks like: http://by.vg/NJ97y
http://by.vg/BQypE Those two url's are flagged as duplicates...please mind the language(Greek) and try to focus on the urls and content. ps: my example is simplified just for the purpose of my question. <colgroup><col width="3436"></colgroup>
| URLs with Duplicate Page Content (up to 5) |0 -
Why would the SEOMoz Page analysis pick up exact keywords used in page title and text?
Hi, I am trying to optimise this URL : www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/ecommerce/features/advanced-ecommerce with the keyword being 'advanced ecommerce' With the 'On-Page Report Card' from SEOMoz that the exact keyword isn't featured in the page title or text, but it is in there. Why would this not be picked up? Thank you in advance,
Moz Pro | | adaptiveconsultancy
M0 -
On page optimisation tool issues
When viewing my campaign and looking at the on page optimisation tool, I have a few issues. I seems to only shows the keywords I want rankings for and how optimised my homepage is for those keywords. Is there any way I can get it to analyse permanently specifc keywords for specific pages because my homepage isnt optimised for some keywords which are on my list, which I have optimised other pages for, and because its looking at my homepage its getting a really low grade, and looks really bad and frustrates me because I cant work this out. Any help greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice1