Moz crawler finding my homepage multiple times
-
Hi and thank you in advance for your help!
I have a Moz Pro campaign running (I am a complete Moz novice by the way) for one of my websites (balloonsutah.com). After crawling my site, the Moz crawler informed me that I have 3 pages with duplicate content. While I am not sure why exactly this is happening, the crawler indexed my homepage 3 times under different url's.
-balloonsutah.com
-balloonsutah.com/
-balloonsutah.com/index.htmlI checked my FTP server and I cannot figure out for the life of me why the crawler is finding anything other than the index.html file.
I suppose I need to do something regarding a rel="Canonical" but I am not terribly familiar with that either.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Keenan -
You're welcome!
-
Great answer! I appreciate the time you spent spelling everything out in detail. Thank you!
-
First things first, I did check all web addresses. They all exist. You probably need to provide more detail whether or not you are using a CMS for your web pages.
All 3 pages have different page authority. That is, one of the version is ranking higher than the other versions. I did a quick check of that via Moz toolbar. Looks like the index.html has the highest authority.
Note that all 3 versions you listed, has 2 other versions. The one with the www, and the one without the www. Judging from the moz toolbar, looks like you rank better for the one without the 'www' . Rel canonical is is good option, but in this case I would try to do a 301 redirect from the server side first. Again, not sure how much access you have to the server side. You might need to contact your web admin.host company etc.
You can read about redirects more over here. --> http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. If you don't have access to the server you can try doing the rel canonical. Read more here --> http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
Example. you have www.example.com/page1.htm, /page2.htm, page3.htm. They all have same exact content. Lets say that pag1.htm is your main version. You can do the following in the header section of page2, and page 3.htm
"This tag tells Bing and Google that the given page should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.example.com/pag1.htm/ and that all of the links and content metrics the engines apply should actually be credited toward the provided URL."
I would recommend not to delete all the other version, but instead do a 301 redirect, or a rel canonical, as they all of some kind of page authority, except index.html has the highest. (the non www version). But you need to make that decision. But looks like that's what you want to be the main one anyway.
ALSO,
You can tell google which version you prefer to google in GWT. This informs google which version you prefer. You can read more here.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en
"Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."
"Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer."
You cannot control the www and non www versons of your website, but you can control, making duplicate pages, especially of your home page. I am guessing that that is something that was done by your CMS. Index.html was probably done by you. FURTHERMORE, I think .com/ & .com is the one and the same thing. and you probably had to decide, when you were making a new campaign in moz. They probably asked you to put down your web address for your domain, and your probably put something like, "balloonsutah.com"Not exactly sure, why it showed you .com & .com/, but it makes sense that they would show you, .com, and /index.html, as they are two different pages, even though it has the same content. It still is two different URL's.
I probably wouldn't worry too much about it. But I'll let one of the moz members answer about .com &.com/. I would perhaps concern myself more about 301 redirects, and rel canonicals.
Hope I helped.
-
Thank you for the help!
-
Hello Keenan-price,
Welcome to the Moz community!
Moz is reporting these duplicates correctly. Each of the listed URLs are seen as unique URLs and unique pages. This is a common problem when a website does not have the proper canonical tags and 301 redirects in place for these URLs.
You'll want to decide on how your website should be displayed (which URL you prefer) and implement the canonical tag and 301 redirects.
the 301 redirects could be done with your .htaccess file, depending on your site environment. The canonical tags would depend on your site's environment (wordpress, custom development, ect).
Also, make sure to go into your Google Webmaster Tools account and specify a single page as being the correct page, once you've decided on how you want the URL to be displayed.
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
-
I can't find multiple titles
Hello, Moz showed a lot of multiple titles on our website but, when I go to fix them, there isn't any multiple titles. I was wondering if anyone knew where these issues could be coming from? Many thanks, Olivia
Moz Bar | | SigneerHFS0 -
Moz Content --- for SEO or simply user engagement?
What is the primary function of Moz Content? It looks like it is most useful for managing content as a user engagement tool. Our content strategy is centered on boosting organic placement - with user engagement as a nice but unessential side product. Besides providing general descriptive details of a site's content / authorship - how can Moz Content help with SEO?
Moz Bar | | cvonhassell0 -
MOZ crawler has been finding a lot of 803 and 804 errors
During last 3 weeks MOZ crawler has been finding a lot of 803 and 804 errors. Meanwhile all pages seem to be working fine. What could cause it?
Moz Bar | | Paruyr0 -
Keyword research in Moz - Am I missing something?…
I'm fairly new at SEO and am still trying out MOZ. I'm finding myself wishing that Moz had a broader set of tools for keyword research, but am wondering if maybe I'm just missing something. Am I correct in saying that there is no place within Moz that you can get keyword ideas, select/organize keywords, find new/related keywords? I've appreciated the keyword difficulty tool and have played around with Moz Analytics keyword tracking, but these don't help with the broader keyword research aspect. The various tutorials talk about using Google AdWords Keyword Planner and other tools to do that job. But with all that Moz can do, it just seems backwards to do lots of copying-pasting from other tools into Moz, or to have to rely on old excel spreadsheets to organize keywords. It seems that life would be much easier if Moz would be able to pull that kind of external research information in, like Raven does. That way you do most of your research within Moz – allowing you to organize/evaluate potential keywords BEFORE choosing the ones you would like to test for difficulty or track. That way you could simply select the desired keywords and add them to your tracked list. The way it is now, even the one research tool that Moz does have (keyword difficulty) does not allow for an easy way to track or manage a chosen set of keywords. For example, after doing some keyword difficulty analysis, I've chose 5 keywords. To add these 5 to the tracked keywords in a specific campaign I can't just select them and say "track keywords > in xxx campaign". From what I've understood, I must copy-and-paste them into the manage keyword section of the desired campaign. To me this all feels a bit awkward. But since I'm new at this, maybe I'm just missing something? Or maybe it's unrealistic to expect a single tool to address all my SEO needs?
Moz Bar | | Mike_E0 -
Time out writing responses to Moz Q&A
This is driving me crazy and making me wish to destroy everything I can reach with my hands. I like to write long curated answers to people questions on here. And evidently there's some sort of timeouts in Moz Q&A software. Because every time I answer to someone I get this fu#@!ng error message... http://imgur.com/ypVQ2hD So I go back, I lost everything and either give up or write one sentence. ypVQ2hD
Moz Bar | | max.favilli0 -
Link to hotels on http://moz.com/mozcon doesn't work
Hi The link to the hotel for Mozcon 2015 doesn't work - seems like its the 2014 link still in place. Thanks Andy
Moz Bar | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Can Moz use canconical links to prevent notices about duplicate content issues?
if so how do we enable this - we've an average size site with a few hundred products but they appear in multiple categories, canonical url points to it's primary category (but a new page exists for each section... so for /cat-a/abc there will be another page cat-b/abc and again but the canonical points to cat-a always for that product) basically I see this kind of duplication error / notice as a false positive... help me
Moz Bar | | SEOAndy0 -
Moz crawl sees meta description but there are none
I have a new site I have run a starter crawl on. The crawl came back saying some of the pages do indeed have meta descriptions. When I go to the same page and use the Moz Chrome toolbar it says they do not have meta descriptions. I also know they do not have meta descriptions. Are there any instances in which the Moz crawler would see them when they are not there?
Moz Bar | | SBXMedia0